He started talking to us. I noticed he was kind of like one of these very hyper people who keep changing topics and jumping around, talking about different times in his life and different stuff he did. I kept trying to impress him with my Blue Box. I boasted about how small it was, how few parts it took, and how it was digital—that was the main thing. I told him there was just one thing, 1 hadn't figured out how to make international calls yet. And he showed me the procedure right away. Strangely enough, it was the same procedure we'd read about in the
Esquire
article, but it didn't work then, don't ask me why.
Then suddenly Captain Crunch said, "Wait, wait a minute. I am going to go out to my car now and get my
automatic
Blue Box."
We knew right away that this was going to be some incredible piece of equipment that's going to be something special, like the digital Blue Box I'd designed. The way he said it—automatic. It was sort of a competitive thing.
I had this image of what this van must look like—with everything he needed to seize phone systems and other stuff in it. I imagined racks of engineering equipment and telephone equipment based on what I'd read in
Esquire.
So I asked him, "Can I come?" I just had to see it. It was as if I'd be seeing history, like one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Well, I followed him out to the parking lot where his VW van was parked. It was completely empty. It was a totally empty van. All it had in it was this little Blue Box device on the floor, and a strange kind of crossbow-shaped thing, like a cross. It turned out that was the antenna he used to run San Jose Free Radio, a pirate radio station. He said the reason he ran it out of his van was so that no one from the FCC could ever pinpoint his location. Brilliant!
So that was to his credit, but still, all this equipment I expected to see wasn't there, and then there were his looks, and the strangely empty van. Everything was starting to not add up all of a sudden. I started to feel queasy and uncomfortable standing there. My previous ideas about what phone phreaks were supposed to be like were not meshing with the person I was looking at. This was a technical scallywag.
Then we went back to my dorm room and he took out this automatic box and showed me a few of its special abilities. The box had sliding switches—ten of them—to let you set up each of ten possible digits in a phone number. You could just push a button on the box—beep beep beep—and dial the whole number from there, no whistling or tone signals required! I was totally impressed by this, it was just really great.
• O •
Later on, four of us—Steve Jobs, Captain Crunch, a guy named Alan McKittrick (who we called Groucho), and I—headed to Kips pizza parlor. We kept trading codes for dialing into various places and techniques like using Blue Boxes from pay phones.
At around midnight, we said our goodbyes. Captain Crunch wanted to go over to Groucho's house first and then drive his van home to where he lived in Los Gatos. So Steve Jobs and I took Steve's car back to his house in Los Altos, where my Pinto was parked.
Steve mentioned that his car had been having generator problems. When I asked what that meant, he said, "Pretty much the whole car can just suddenly shut down at some point."
About halfway down, in Hayward on what was then Highway 17, as I recall, it actually happened. The car lost all lights and power. Steve was able to pull over to the right near an exit and we walked to a gas station where there was a pay phone. We thought we'd call Groucho—a long-distance number from Hay- ward—and ask Draper to pick us up on his way down south.
Steve put a clime in the pay phone and dialed the operator. He told her he was about to make a "data call," to keep her from thinking that our line was going off the hook for the brief period while we used the Blue Box. He asked her to connect us to a free 800 number or long-distance directory assistance, some free call. Then we "blew it off" (seized the line with a 2,600 hertz tone) and Steve proceeded to use the Blue Box to call Groucho. But the operator came back on the line, so Steve hung up the phone quickly. This was not good!
We tried it again, telling the next operator that it was a data call and to ignore any weird light she might see. But the same thing happened. The operator came back on the line just before we made the connection. Again, Steve hung up instantly. We thought we were getting in deep trouble, that somehow our Blue Box had been detected.
Finally we decided to use coins and just call Groucho the legal way. We did and asked Captain Crunch to pick us up. All of a sudden, a cop pulled into the gas station and jumped out real fast. Steve was still holding the Blue Box when he jumped out, that's how fast it happened. We didn't even have time to hide it. We were sure that the operator had called the cops on us, and that this was the end for sure.
The cop was kind of heavyset and walked past me for some reason, shining his flashlight on the plants about eight feet in
front of me. I had long hair and a headband back then, so I guess he was looking for drugs we'd stashed. Then the cop started examining the bushes, rifling through them with his hands in the dark.
In the meantime, trembling with fear, Steve passed the Blue Box to me. He didn't have a jacket on, but I did. I slid it into my pocket.
But then the cop turned back to us and patted us down. He felt my Blue Box and I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to him. We knew we were caught. The cop asked me what it was. I was not about to say, "Oh, this is a Blue Box for making free telephone calls." So for some reason I said it was an electronic music synthesizer. The Moog synthesizer actually had just come out, so this was a good phrase to use. I pushed a couple of the Blue Box buttons to demonstrate the tones. This was pretty rare, as even touch-tone phones were still kind of rare in this part of the country then.
The cop then asked what the orange button was for. (It was actually the button that sounded the nice pure 2,600 Hz tone to seize a phone line.) Steve told the cop that the orange button was for "calibration." Ha!
A second cop approached. I guess he had stayed back in the police car at first. He took the Blue Box from the first cop. This device was clearly their point of interest, and surely they knew what it was, having been called by the phone operator. The second cop asked what it was. I said it was an electronic music synthesizer. He also asked what the orange button was for, and Steve again said that it was for calibration. We were two scared young cold and shivering boys by this time. Well, at least Steve was shivering. I had a coat.
The second cop was looking at the Blue Box from all angles. He asked how it worked and Steve said that it was computer- controlled. He looked at it some more, from every angle, and asked where the computer plugged in. Steve said that "it connected inside."
We both knew the cops were playing with us.
The cops asked what we were doing and we told them our car had broken down on the freeway. They asked where it was and we pointed. The cops, still holding the Blue Box, told us to get in the backseat of their car to go check out the car story. In the
How Ma Bell Helped Us Build the Blue Box
In 1955, the
Bell System Technical Journal
published an article entitled "In Band Signal Frequency Signaling" which described the process used for routing telephone calls over trunk lines with the signaling system at the time. It included all the information you'd need to build an interoffice telephone system, but it didn't include the MF (multifrequency) tones you needed for accessing the system and dialing.
But nine years later, in 1964, Bell revealed the other half of the equation, publishing the frequencies used for the digits needed for the actual routing codes.
Now, anybody who wanted to get around Ma Bell was set. The formula was there for the taking. All you needed were these two bits of information found in these two articles. If you could build the equipment to emit the frequencies needed, you could make your own free calls, skipping Ma Bell's billing and monitoring system completely.
Famous "phone phreaks" of the early 1970s include Joe Engressia (a.k.a. Joybubbles), who was able to whistle (with his mouth) the high E tone needed to take over the line. John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch) did the same with the free whistle that came inside boxes of Cap'n Crunch. A whole subculture was born. Eventually Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Oaf Tobar) and I (a.k.a. Berkeley Blue) joined the group, making and selling our own versions of the Blue Boxes. We actually made some good money at this.
backseat of a cop car you know where you are going eventually: to jail.
The cops got in the front. I was seated behind the driver. The cop in the passenger seat had the Blue Box. Just before the car started moving, or maybe just after, he turned to me and passed me the Blue Box, commenting, "A guy named Moog beat you to it."
Chapter 7
Escapades with Steve
The internal joy I felt when the cop believed our story about the Blue Box being the Moog synthesizer is almost indescribable.
Not only were we not being arrested for making illegal calls with or owning a Blue Box, but these supposedly intelligent cops had totally bought our B.S. God, I wanted to laugh out loud. Our moods changed instantly.
I mean, one second we thought we were being driven off to jail, and the next we realized we had bamboozled the police. Bamboozled up the yazoo! This was such an important lesson to learn in life, and such a continuing theme for me. Some people will just believe the strangest stuff, stuff that doesn't bear any semblance to reality.
After the cops dropped us off, we waited at the gas station until finally Captain Crunch showed up in his van. That van sure was scary to ride in as a passenger. It felt like it was going to fall over, it was so rickety. It didn't feel solid at all. It was probably about 2 a.m. by the time we got back to Steve's house all the way down in Los Altos. I picked up my car—I had an ochre-colored Pinto at this time—and drove it back to Berkeley.
I was tired. I shouldn't have been on the road. Because you know what happened? Somewhere near Oakland on Highway 17, I fell asleep at the wheel. I don't know how long my eyes were closed, but suddenly I opened my eyes and it looked to me like the guardrail was jumping onto my windshield. It looked so strange, like a dream. I grabbed the steering wheel, yanked it as hard as I could to the right, and the car just started spinning around and around.
The only thing holding me in that car was the seat belt.
As the car was spinning, I was thinking, This is it. I might die. I could really die. But then the car slid to a stop up against the center guardrail, and it turned out that only the side of the Pinto that hit the guardrail was damaged. But it totaled my car.
• o •
Losing my Pinto changed my life completely. One of the major parts of my life at Berkeley was taking groups of people down to Southern California or even as far south as Tijuana, Mexico, on weekends. Actually, my first thought after the crash wasn't, Oh, thank god I'm alive, but Man, now I'm not going to be able to take my friends on wild adventures anymore.
The car crash was the main reason that, after this school year, my third year at Berkeley, I went back to work instead of coming back to school. I needed to earn money, not just for the fourth year of college but also for a new car.
If I hadn't gotten in the car accident that year, I wouldn't have quit school and I might never have started Apple. It's weird how things happen.
• o •
But for the rest of the year at Berkeley, I kept playing with my Blue Box. Captain Crunch's design had given me an idea: to add a single little button where I could preprogram a ten-digit number.
The number I chose to dial was this weird joke line in Los Angeles. It was called Happy Ben. When you called it, this cranky old guy—he sounded like a real old guy—would answer in this
old voice like gravel: "Hey," he'd say, "it's me, Happy Ben." And then he'd sing, off-key, and with no music: "Happy days are here again / happy days are here again / happy days are here again / happy days are here again." And then, "Yep, it's me again. It's Ben."
Don't ask me why, but of all the joke lines in the world I now had free access to with my Blue Box, that one number always cheered me up and made me smile. It was just the fact that this grumpy-sounding old guy would sing that song in such a truly happy way. Somehow that style of humor made me laugh. I hope to do the same thing myself someday. Maybe I can sing the national anthem on a joke line. I still might.
• o •
Now that I had a Blue Box that could call anywhere, even internationally, I had a lot of fun calling joke lines all over the world. I'd walk up to a pay phone, dial some 800 number, seize the line with the Blue Box, push the automatic button—beep beep beep—and there he was again. Happy Ben singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." It was my favorite thing.
But I hadn't forgotten what was supposed to be the real mission of phone phreaking: not to mess up the system, but to find flaws and curious things and secrets the phone company never told anyone about. And I really did stick with the honesty thing. Even when I made my calls to friends, relatives, to people I normally would've called anyway, I made a point of paying for those calls. I didn't use the Blue Box. To me, that would have been stealing, and that wasn't what I was about.