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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