But I did like to use the Blue Box to see how far it could get me. For instance, I would make a call to an operator and pretend I was a New York operator trying to extend the lines for phase measurements, and she would connect me to London. Then I'd talk that operator into connecting me to Tokyo. I would go around the world like this sometimes three times or more.
And by this time I got great at sounding official, or doing accents, all to fool operators around the world. I remember one very, very late night in the dorm when I decided to call the pope. Why the pope? I don't know. Why not? So I started by using the Blue Box to call Italy Inward (country code 121), then I asked for Rome Inward, and then I got to the Vatican and in this heavy accent I announced I was Henry Kissinger calling on behalf of President Nixon. I said, "Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and ve need to talk to de pope."
And a woman said, "It's five-thirty here. The pope is sleeping." She put me on hold then for a while, and then told me they were sending someone to wake him and asked if I could call back. I said yes, in an hour.
Well, an hour later I called back and she said, "Okay, we will put the bishop on, who will be the translator." So I told him, still in that heavy accent, "Dees is Mr. Kissinger." And he said, "Listen, I just spoke to Mr. Kissinger an hour ago." You see, they had checked out my story and had called the real Kissinger in Moscow.
Ha! But I didn't hang up. I said, "You can verify my number. You can call me back." And I gave him a U.S. number that would call a loop-back number so they wouldn't find out my number. But they never called back, which was too bad.
Years later, though, I couldn't stop laughing when I saw an article about me where they were interviewing Captain Crunch. He said I was calling the pope to make a confession!
• o •
For ages and ages, I always told people how I was the ethical phone phreak who always paid for my own calls and was just exploring the system. And that was true. I used to get huge phone bills, even though I had my Blue Box that would've let me make any call for free.
But one day Steve Jobs came along and said, "Hey, let's sell
these." So by selling them to others we really were getting the technology out to people who were using it to call their girlfriends and the like and save money on phone calls. So looking back, I guess that, yes, I aided and abetted that crime.
We had a pretty interesting way of selling them. What we would do is Steve and I would find groups of people in various dorms at Berkeley to sell them to. I was always the ringleader, which was really unusual for me. I was the one who did all the talking. You know, I thought I'd be so famous doing this, but it's funny, I didn't know you had to talk to a reporter to get your phone phreak handle (mine was Berkeley Blue) in articles.
Anyway, the way we did it was just by knocking on doors. How do you know you're not walking up to somebody who's going to turn you in? Someone who might see it as a crime? Well, we'd knock on a door (usually a door in a male dorm) and ask for someone nonexistent like, "Is Charlie Johnson there?" And they'd say, "Who's Charlie Johnson?"
And I'd say, "You know, the guy that makes all the free phone calls." If they sort of seemed cool—and you could tell by their face if they wanted to talk about such a tiling as illegal free phone calls—I'd add, "You know, he has the Blue Boxes?"
Sometimes they might say, "Oh my god, I've heard about those things." And if they sounded really cool enough, and every once in a while they did, then one of us pulled a Blue Box out of our pockets. They'd say something like, "Wow! Is that what they look like? Is that real?"
And that's how we knew we had the right guy and he wouldn't turn us in. Then one of us would say, "Tell you what, we'll come back at 7 p.m. tonight; have everyone you know who knows someone in a foreign country here and we'll give you a demo."
And we'd come back at 7 p.m. We'd run a wire across their dorm room and we'd hook it up to the tape recorder. That way,
everything was tape-recorded—every single sale we ever did was tape-recorded. Just to play it safe.
We made a little money selling Blue Boxes. It was enough at the time. Originally I would buy the parts to hand-build one for $80. The distributor in Mountain View where I got the chips (no electronics stores sold chips) charged a ton for small quantities. We eventually made a printed circuit board and, making ten or twenty at a time, got the cost down to maybe $40. We sold them for $150 and split the revenue.
So it was a pretty good business proposition except for one thing. Blue Boxes were illegal, and we were always worried about getting caught.
• o •
One time Steve and I had a Blue Box ready for sale. Steve needed some extra money, and he really wanted us to sell the box that day. It was a Sunday. Before driving up to Berkeley to sell the Blue Box, we stopped to eat at a Sunnyvale pizza parlor. While eating our pizza, we noticed a few guys at the next table. They looked cool, and we started talking to them. It turned out they were interested in seeing one and buying it.
We then went to a rear hallway of the pizza parlor, where there was a pay phone. Steve pulled out the Blue Box. They gave us a number in Chicago, in the 312 area code, to test it. The call went through to a ringing phone, which no one answered.
The three guys were really excited and told us they wanted the Blue Box but couldn't afford it. Steve and I headed out to the parking lot to get into Steve's car. And just very quickly, before Steve started the engine, one of the guys popped up next to the driver's-side window with a big long black gun barrel pointed right at us.
He demanded the Blue Box.
Steve nervously handed it to him. And the thieves went to their own car. As we sat there, stunned, an amazing thing hap
pened. One of the guys came back to the car and explained he didn't have the money yet, but he did want the Blue Box. And that they would pay us eventually. And he wrote down a phone number and a name for us to call him at. His name was Charles.
After a few days, Steve called the number. Someone answered, and when we asked for Charles, he gave us the number of a pay phone. We knew it was a pay phone because back then, if the last four digits of any number started with a 9 or a 99, it was certainly a pay phone.
Steve called that number, and Charles answered. He said he would pay us eventually for the Blue Box, but he needed to know how to use it.
Steve tried to talk him into returning it to us. Charles said he wanted to meet us somewhere. We were too scared to meet him, even in a public place. I came up with the idea of telling him a method to use that would get him billed for every call—like, to start your call by dialing an 808 number, which is an area code for Hawaii. I also thought of telling him a way to use it that would get him caught. Like dialing 555 information calls, which look suspicious when they last for hours.
If only I'd been more of a joker, I would've thought to tell him to start by dialing the number of a police station.
But I didn't recommend any of those things, and in the end, Steve hung up. We were too scared to do anything, and for sure Charles and those guys never learned how to use it.
Chapter 8
HP and Moonlighting as a Crazy Polack
This much I know for sure: I was meant to be an engineer who designs computers, an engineer who writes software, an engineer who tells jokes, and an engineer who teaches other people things.
Now, finally, there was a time in my life—a time right after that third year at Berkeley—that I finally got my dream job. But it wasn't a job building computers. It was a job designing calculators at Hewlett-Packard. And I really thought I would spend the rest of my life there. That place was just the most perfect company.
This was January of 1973, and for an engineer like me, there was no better place to work in the world. Unlike a lot of technology companies, Hewlett-Packard wasn't totally run by marketing people. It really respected its engineers. And that made sense, because this was a company that had made engineering tools for years—meters, oscilloscopes, power supplies, testers of all types, even medical equipment. It made all the things engineers actually used, and it was a company driven by engineers on the inside so far as what engineers on the outside needed. Man, I loved that.
For just a few months before that, right after I finished Berke ley in June, I worked at a much, much smaller company, called Electroglas. That was a blast, too. Getting that job was almost too easy. I'd looked in the newspaper ads, and the first ad I saw was for an electronics technician for $600 a month, or close to that. I called them up and they said, "Come on down for an interview." Well, I went down and they gave me this incredibly easy written test—you know, with electronic formulas and all. Of course, I knew that stuff. I'd known it forever. They interviewed me and instantly hired me, so I had a job. And they paid me enough that I was actually able to get my first apartment. It was in Cupertino, just a mile from my parents' house. And it was just the greatest, greatest thing.
But six months later I heard from my old friend Allen Baum, who by then was working as an intern at Hewlett-Packard. He was excited, telling me he was actually hanging around the guys who'd designed the HP 35 calculator. This, to me, was the most incredible invention of all time.
I'd been a slide rule whiz in high school, so when I saw the calculator, it was just amazing. A slide rule was kind of like a ruler— you had to look at it precisely to read the values. The most accurate number you could get was only three digits long, however, and even that result was always questionable. With a calculator, you could punch in precisely the digits you wanted. You didn't have to line up a slider. You could type in your numbers exactly, hit a button, and get an answer immediately. You could get that number all the way out to ten digits. For example, the real answer might be 3.158723623. An answer like that was much more precise than anything engineers had ever gotten before.
Well, the HP 35 was the first scientific calculator, and it was the first in history that you could actually hold in your hand. It could calculate sines and cosines and tangents, all the trigonometric and exponential/logarithmic functions engineers use to calculate and to do their jobs. This was 1973, and back then cal
culators—especially handheld calculators—were a very, very big deal.
So Allen's internship was working in the calculator group. He told me he'd told Ms managers all about me, that I was a great designer and had designed all these computers and things, and all of a sudden I found myself interviewing with a vice president of engineering, and the people under him, and the people under them. I guess they were impressed, because they made me an offer right away to come work there. They told me I could help design scientific calculators at HP. I thought, Oh my God.
I did love my job at Electroglas. I got to stand up all day, which I like, and help test and repair circuits. (A lot of their chips went bad because, instead of sockets, they used the soldered resistor- transistor logic [RTL] method of attaching chips.) I liked everyone I worked with and I'd made a lot of good friends. So when I told them about the job offer at HP, man, they did everything to keep me. They told me they'd make me a full engineer, they would up my salary over what HP had offered, and I felt bad because I really did love that company.
But even though Electroglas was what I considered to be a great job, it was nothing compared to what I considered to be the ideal job in the whole world: working on handheld scientific calculators at the only company in the world that could build a product like that. How could you beat that?
I was already a big fan of Hewlett-Packard. When I was at Berkeley, I'd even saved up to spend $400 (that's about $2,000 in today's money) on the HP 35.
There was no doubt in my mind that calculators were going to put slide rules out of business. (In fact, two years later you couldn't even buy a slide rule. It was extinct.) And now all of a sudden I'd gotten a job helping to design the next generation of these scientific calculators. It was like getting to be a part of history.
This was the company for me because, like I said, I'd already decided that I wanted to be an engineer for life. It was especially neat because I got to work on a product that at the time was the highlight product of the world—the scientific calculator. To me, it was the luckiest job I could have.
As an example of how great a company HP was, consider this. During this time—the early 1970s—the recession was going on and everyone was losing their jobs. Even HP had to cut back 10 percent on its expenses. But instead of laying people off, HP wound up cutting everyone's salary by 10 percent. That way, no one would be left without a job.
You know, my dad had always told me that your job is the most important thing you'll ever have and the worst thing to lose.
I still think that way. My thinking is that a company is like a family, a community, where we all take care of each other. I never agreed with the normal thinking, where a company is more competition driven, and the poorest, youngest or most recently hired workers are always the first to go.
By the way, I was twenty-two when I got that job at Hewlett- Packard.