#5 Steve Jobs

**David Senra** (0:00)
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The ultimate combination of pranks and electronics and the escapade that helped to create Apple was launched one Sunday afternoon when Wozniak read an article in Esquire that his mother had left for him on the kitchen table. The story described how hackers and phone freakers had found ways to make long distance calls for free by replicating the tones that routed signals on the AT&T network. Halfway through the article, I had to call my best friend Steve Jobs, Wozniak recalled. A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker known as Captain Crunch because he had discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the breakfast cereal was the same 2600 hertz tone used by the phone network's call routing switches. It could fool the system into allowing a long-distance call to go through without extra charges. The article revealed that the other tones that serve to route calls could be found in an issue of the Bell System Technical Journal, which AT&T immediately began asking libraries to pull from their shelves.
Woz picked me up a few minutes later, and we went to the library at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to see if we could find it, and Jobs recounted, I remember that we were furiously digging through the stacks, and it was Woz who finally found the journal with all the frequencies. It was like, holy shit, and we opened it up, and there it was. We kept saying to ourselves, it's real, holy shit, it's real. It was all laid out, the tones and the frequencies.
No one had ever created a digital version of a blue box. The blue box is the device that phone freakers use to make these calls for free.
No one had ever created a digital version of the blue box, but Woz was made for the challenge. Using diodes and transistors from RadioShack, and with the help of a music student in his dorm who had perfect pitch, he got it built. They attempted to call Wozniak's uncle in Los Angeles, but they got a wrong number. It didn't matter. Their device had worked. Hi, we're calling you for free. We're calling you for free, Wozniak shouted. The person on the other end was confused and annoyed. Jobs chimed in. We're calling from California, from California, with a blue box. This probably baffled the man even more since he was also in California.
It was then that they reached an important milestone, one that would establish a pattern in their partnership. Jobs came up with the idea that the blue box could be more than merely a hobby. They could build and sell them. I got together the rest of the components, like the casing and power supply and keypads, and figured out how we could price it, Jobs said, foreshadowing roles he would play when they founded Apple. The finished product was about the size of two decks of playing cards. The parts cost about $40, and Jobs decided they should sell it for $150. They took the device to the college dorms and gave demonstrations by attaching it to a phone and a speaker. While the potential customers watched, they would call the Ritz in London, or a Dial a Joke service in Australia. We made 100 or so blue boxes and sold almost all of them, Jobs recalled.
The fun doesn't last, though. This is a really interesting story. It's about a robbery that's about to happen. The fun and profits came to an end at Sunnyvale Pizza Parlor. Jobs and Wozniak were about to drive to Berkeley with a blue box they had just finished making. Jobs needed money and was eager to sell, so he pitched the device to some guys at the next table. They were interested, so Jobs went to a phone booth and demonstrated it with a call to Chicago. The prospects said that they had to go to their car for money.
So we walk over to the car, Woz and me, and I've got the blue box in my hand. And the guy gets in, reaches under the seat, and he pulls out a gun, Jobs recounted. He had never been that close to a gun, and he was terrified. So he's pointing the gun right at my stomach, and he says, hand it over, brother. My mind raced. There was the car door here, and I thought maybe I could slam it onto his legs and we could run. But there was this high probability that he would shoot me. So I slowly handed it to him very carefully. It was a weird sort of robbery. The guy who took the blue box actually gave Jobs a phone number, and said he would try to pay for it if it worked. When Jobs later called the number, the guy said he couldn't figure out how to use it. So Jobs, in his felicitous way, convinced the guy to meet him in Wozniak at a public place. But they ended up deciding not to have another encounter with the gunmen, even on the off chance that they could get their $150.