“If we hadn’t made those blue boxes, there would be no Apple.”
This quote from Steve Wozniak is an intriguing teaser into the fascinating world of phone phreaks—the hackers of the late 1960s and 1970s, who managed to place calls to none other than the Pope and President Richard Nixon for free. They did so using devices that produced high-pitched beeps mimicking the relatively few master tones AT&T used to power the entire long-distance system.
Tracing modern tech culture back to the blue‑box era
Calling an 800 number from a pay phone for anonymity, a phreaker would quickly use their device—whether a “blue box” or a Cap’n Crunch cereal box toy whistle—to sound the tones. They could then bounce around the world, dialing time and temperature in Rome or calling random pay phones in London. One of the most famous phreakers, Joe Engressia, was blind and made his calls using his own whistle. He had perfect pitch.
Engressia’s story was chronicled in “Secrets of the Blue Box,” an October 1971 Esquire magazine article by Ron Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum’s article transports the reader into a shadowy world, filled with individuals who were sometimes lonely, sometimes curious, and sometimes both.
Wozniak, then a student at the University of California, Berkeley, read that article. So did his younger friend Steve Jobs. The two set out to build the first digital blue box and began selling them at Berkeley. They even connected with the phreaker “Cap’n Crunch” (Joe Draper) for a consultation.
As you know, Wozniak and Jobs soon switched to pursuit innovations on the right side of the law. Their “blue boxes” have sold at auction for up to $125,000.
And the phreaker who called the Pope? That was the Woz pretending to be Henry Kissinger.
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Photo: Stokkete / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.