The Box That inspired Steve Jobs

This past week the world lost a great leader and visionary in the tech industry with the passing of Steve Jobs. He and Apple Co Founder Steve Wozniak helped usher in the era of personal computers. Apple would later lead a cultural transformation in music, movies and mobile communications in the digital age. What is lesser known is what inspired the two Steve's to start  Apple, the Blue Box. To understand why a Blue Box was so important to the founding of Apple you need to take a look at the original computer hackers -- the phone phreak.

From the Times obit for Steve Jobs.

"The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Wozniak’s mother. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobbyist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illicitly exploring the nation’s phone system.

Mr. Wozniak shared the article with Mr. Jobs, and the two set out to track down an elusive figure identified in the article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken the name from his discovery that a whistle that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whistle next to a phone handset.

The term Phreaking was used in the mid 60's to describe people who study, experimented, or explored telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. Back in the early 60's telephone networks were becoming computerized -- the live operators that manually placed calls when you dialed a number were being replaced with automatic computerized switches to complete calls. With the introduction of automatic switches, the general population began, for the first time, to interact with computing power on a large scale. Many individuals interested in computers and technology, were unable to further that interest and therefore turned to the only available option: the computer controlled telephone network.

A large percentage of early phone Phreaks were blind. Joe Engressia, a blind seventeen-year old was skilled with perfect pitch, and discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C -- a frequency of 2600 Hz--would stop the phone's dial tone. He then founded he could activate phone switches and make calls using different tones. Using this info other people began to develop a rudimentary understanding of how phone networks worked. John Draper a former Air Force electronic technician, discovered through his friendship with Engressia that the free whistles in a Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes could also produced a 2600 Hz tone when blown (providing his nickname, "Captain Crunch").

Draper experimented further and built a a multi-frequency tone generator -- a blue box to gain easier entry into the AT&T system. It functioned by replicating the normal tones used to switch long distance calls and using them to route the user's own call. This bypassed the normal switching mechanism. The most common use of a blue box was to place free telephone calls. 

It took the two Steve's several weeks to find Captain Crunch but after some work they got him to come to the dorms  at UC Berkeley.  Based on information they gleaned from Draper they maded their own blue box "Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs later collaborated on building and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely used for making free—and illegal—phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort." On one occasion Wozniak dialed Vatican City and identified himself as Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the Pope, sadly he was sleeping at the time. The next time they attempted to use it they were almost arrested by a police officer passing by the pay phone they were using.   The cop let them go thinking the blue box was a toy.