About telephone hacking device "Blue Box" leading to the establishment of Apple Woz and Jobs, stakeholders

Steve Jobs founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and others in 1977, but the two people met for the first time in 1971. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak who were still high school students are said to have made a huge amount of money with a device called "Blue Box" that can hack telephone lines and make phone calls anywhere in the world for free. A story about such a blue box is introduced in the movie.

Before they Created Apple, Jobs And Wozniak Hacked The Phone System | FiveThirtyEight
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A picture given as "Can you explain this picture?" To talk about this with your hand ... ...


Apple's co-founder, Steve Wozniak. "This is a picture of me and Steve Jobs, probably taken in the Jobs' bedroom.It is the device which is in the size of" Blue Box "that is in hand, but from this picture the blue box I can not affirm it. "


Then Mr. Jobs reflected and "Woz (nickname of Mr. Wozniak) and I made the first time was a blue box, the blue box was a device that can make phone calls anywhere in the world" "But I must say that it was an illegal thing," he says that it was a gloomy device.


Changing the destiny of the two people was an article on 14 pages called "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" which was published in the male culture magazine "Esquire". Wozniak recalls, "This article has been the most influential of the articles I have seen."


"This device is like a rebellion against a telephone company, I was absorbed in joining as a part of that rebellion," Wozniak talks about the charm of the Blue Box.


On the other hand, Mr. Jobs also said, "A device of about 100 dollars (about 10,000 yen), assembled by two teenagers, controls tens of billions of yen infrastructure of a telephone company ..."


"It's exactly like magic," he is crazy and speaks.


Writer Phil Razley said "Early phones were pretty simple, and when you want to call someone's place, the telephone line connects by connecting the two telephone lines directly." And comment on the mechanism of the old telephone.


Connecting the two lines was the task of a "telephone exchanger". However, when the telephone spreads in the 1970's, it becomes obvious that it is impossible to deal with all telephone lines very manually. Introduced in that place is a computer-based telephone exchange.


"When I make a phone call," Pipopa ... "is heard, but the computer that heard that sound recognizes the phone number ..."


"It is supposed to connect the line to the other party's phone"


In the early 1960s, an American telephone company "AT & amp; T" recognizes numbers by a combination of two tones with different sound heightsDTMF(Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency: the so-called "push tone") mechanism.


Based on this invention, a system for operating a telephone exchange with a tone signal of "Pi-Po" when making a call has been put to practical use.


However, the device which obviously had problems such as "hacking" the mechanism to free the phone fee is "blue box".


Mr. Wozniak at the time talks "It is possible to call freely anywhere, any way through the world by using this tone mechanism", and there is also the state that it is left speaking. In fact, in addition to being able to talk to any country from the United States free of charge, there was also a possibility of tricking around from the phone through the overseas telephone line from one telephone to talk with the phone immediately next to the earth .


I discovered this hacking method was that there were several students enrolled at Harvard University in the early 1960s. At that time I was calling them "freak".


Tony Louke, one such freak, said, "When I was absorbed in phone hacking, the phone system was still low in level," he said.


"But even then it was said that" the huge computer system at the time "and so on"


"When I entered college, I came in and out of radio stations, where I came across Charlie."


Mr. Louke's Charlie, this Charlie Pine. "I started studying the phone at Harvard radio station" WHRB "


"And then I met the 1966 material" Notes on Distance Dialing "


"There are things about the detailed mechanisms by which the phone is connected ..."


"Area code (area number) etc. for each area was written"


"So," I thought, "If you know all the numbers and signal tones written here, you could even make your own device," he said, talking about the epoch-making moment that leads to the later blue box I will. This act is called "Free King".


Then, I actually generated the tone signal, recorded it on the tape and played it on the phone mouth, I succeeded in calling splendely.


In this way, the Blue Box proved to be a "usable" device in fact.


However, although it was a free king that began with mere interest, it has various problems. Especially since it was a cold war era by the US and the Soviet Union at the time, there is no regulation for free and that you can call overseas will have the same meaning as "spy act". In this way, Free King was supposed to be regulated by the authorities.


Nonetheless, Free King is born of "curiosity" to the last, whether it is misused or not is another problem. Mr. Wozniak recalls that "Freing King is a thing using the latest technology of the time, and it enables us to do things that others can not do."


When free king became difficult, the technique to whistle whistle became famous. A blind man, John Engrécia, succeeded in making a phone call by whistling regularly "whistling ...".


It seems that this has become a hot topic in the press at the time.



It was exchanged as a hero during the freak of the time, "Captain Crunch" Mr. John Draper.


Captain Crunch is introducing a small whistle that can produce special sounds.


It is just "a magical flute" that you can call anywhere away from the regular telephone network by just hitting this whistle at the receiver and ringing "peep."


FREEKING, which enabled free long distance calling by hacking the phone, originally started with the curiosity of the technical geek, but as gradually another powerful force abuses this technology Become.


Its power and those who dyed hands with other crimes. The gaming torso and drug traffickers came to use free king, but in addition to "compression of calling charges", there are also advantages convenient for crime "no call logs remain" Because it was equipped.


For this countermeasure, it is said that the telephone company has been forced to pay a large amount of billions of yen.


Wozniak saw the article of the magazine "Esquire" in 1971. If you were flipping through the magazines in the kitchen table with flipping ......


The attractive heading "Secret of the Little Blue Box" came into my eyes. It seems that the contents are also written about detailed technology, and the heart is deprived of the rebellious contents more than anything.


Mr. Wozniak wrote an article that became interested in free king himself, Ron Rosenbaum says that the composition called freak to face a huge telephone company is a story of an anecdote that weak people beat strong enemies "David and Goliath It's like something like.


Mr. Wozniak quickly persuaded Mr. Jobs to read articles. Mr. Jobs is looking back on this mechanism as "I thought it was very powerful."


And the two began researching at the library of Stanford University.


At that time it was said to have developed the state-of-the-art "world's first digital blue box". The completed equipment was not only functional, but also consciousness was put on the look good that leads to later Apple products such as externally decorated exterior and button design.


Actually, at that time, Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs met the captain crunch.


One day, Wozniak and Jobs call the Vatican with a blue box ... ...


"I am a Henry · Kissinger, I want to talk with the Pope," says US Secretary of State. Mr. Wozniak who was told that "It is still 5 o'clock in the morning and I want you to call back later" calls out and speaks to himself as "Henry · Kissinger" but he told the other party on the other side of the phone, "I met with Kissinger a while ago Even the episode that I was in a panic after being told I was just talking.


Mr. Jobs looks back on the meaning of the Blue Box and says, "What I learned from that experience is the power that the idea has."


"Without the blue box, there would have been no subsequent Apple."


"It was because I realized that the product not only gained the confidence that I could make products, but that the product could make a big impact on the world."


After that, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Woz set up Apple. Where everyone knows the impact on the world.


After that, Captain Crunch, John Draper received a jail sentence for telephone charges fraud which he called oversea later, and said he sentenced to about 3 years in prison. Mr. Wozniak and Jobs who reunited Mr. Draper in 1978 after sourcing hired Mr. Draper to Apple and asked to develop a word processing software "EasyWriter". This software is a software that triggered a great breakthrough by Apple II, and it is no exaggeration to say that it was an exaggeration to say that Apple itself was formed.