Saturday, February 16, 2013

The Blue Box - One Of Steve Jobs First Products


The Two Steves

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs supposedly built and sold such a product in the early 1970s (See here & here). “Going door to door in Berkeley dorms, they managed to sell several dozen at $170 each. The "two Steves" savored this mix of clever engineering and entrepreneurial hustle: As Mr. Lapsley quotes Jobs saying: "If we hadn't made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple."”

The Blue Box

The Blue Box was a device used by phreaks (predecessors of hackers) and criminals to circumvent Ma Bell and wire tapping.

Wikipedia: “A blue box is an unauthorized electronic device that generates the same tones employed by a telephone operator's dialing console to switch long-distance calls. The most typical use of a blue box was to place free telephone calls. … Development and use of the blue box was largely enabled by Bell Telephone's policy of publishing all technical documentation regarding its equipment.”

A Blind Kid Whistling At The Perfect Pitch

The critical 2400 Hz telephone system control tone was discovered in approximately 1957, by Josef Carl Engressia, a blind seven-year old boy who became known as Joybubbles. Engressia was skilled with perfect pitch, and discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2600 Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording. Unaware of what he had done, Engressia called the phone company and asked why the recordings had stopped.

As a five-year old, Engressia had already discovered he could dial phone numbers by clicking the hang-up switch (“tapping”).

In his book iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak mentions Joybubbles as an early inspiration during his college years.

The Moral Of The Story

Big Government created a monopoly called AT&T in 1913, which lasted until 1984 or more than 70 years effectively preventing progress in telecommunications and computers. Thus, the people had to put up with inferior technology and higher pricing for a very long time thanks to Big Government. It is an irony of history that the US federal government created this monopoly even before the Soviet Union came into existence.

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