It is the early 1970s. The telephone is not as widespread as it is today, and calls are expensive because they are billed by the minute and the distance. Calling across the United States, or even internationally, is not within the reach of just anyone.
Hackers are having fun tinkering with all kinds of things around the phone. They are called “phreakers”. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are of that. They are twenty years old. They met at Atari. Together, they make a strange little box called BlueBox. This gadget generates frequencies at 2600 Hz having the effect of deceiving the automatic telephone exchanges of the operator AT&T, which makes it possible to make long distance phone calls without paying a dollar. And without the operator realizing it.
A blue box
Jobs and Wozniak did not invent the principle of the Blue Box which was created 10 years earlier by a certain Ralph Barclay. But Jobs and Wozniak will improve on the concept by making the first digital Blue Box, which performs much better than its analog ancestor. Why this name? Because Barclay’s electronic toy was initially contained in a small blue box.
Jobs and Wozniak will manufacture and sell forty Blue Boxes, with a nice profit, until they put an end to this small illicit trade to devote themselves to their big project: the creation of the Apple company and the manufacture of ‘computers.
The rest is told in this video.
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