It’s a slow news week, so here’s a classic story recently revisited by MAKE.  In the two videos below, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak talk about making blue boxes when they were in college and meeting well-known phreak John Draper (AKA Captain Crunch).  To summarize for people unfamiliar with phone phreaking, a blue box would play a 2600 Hz tone, which signaled to the remote switch at The Bell Telephone Company that your phone was hung up (when it wasn’t).  You’d call a toll-free number in the same area code you wanted to call long-distance, play the tone, then dial the long-distance number in the same area code.  Free phone call, and Bell only had a record of which toll-free number you had dialed.  There was also a Captain Crunch whistle included in cereal boxes that made the same 2600 Hz tone, which is how Draper got his nickname.

In the second video below, Woz and Crunch talk about how Jobs and Woz were once caught using a blue box and (spoiler alert, I guess) convinced the police it was a synthesizer.  One of the officers handed it back to them and said, “A guy named Moog beat you to it.”

In another interview not on video, John Draper said Woz used to sell blue boxes for $150 apiece to pay for schooling and the computer project which later became the Apple I.  Instead of getting all judgemental about it, I should just admit I was one of those dorks who had a T-shirt in school with blue box schematics on it.  And another one with red box schematics.  I was so getting laid like crazy you guys.


[Hat tip and one long toot on a Captain Crunch whistle to myoldmac.]