Before there was Apple, we made Blue Boxes [Rare Video]

Adam Rosen (4:00 am PDT, Feb 21 2011)

Before the Mac, before the Apple II, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made their first product: a digital Blue Box for hacking into telephone systems. In this clip from the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, Jobs describes how the capability of this device so impressed two young teenagers that they began to realize the power of ideas and the potential of technology to control vast amounts of information.

If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.

They also realized the importance of good product packaging – nice wooden shipping case!

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10 comments »

  • iRikal

    Phreaks….. :)
    Good ol’ days

    • http://www.raymack.com Ray Thompson

      I incorporated this video (with their kind permission) into my personal history of early Apple computing (1977) and the history of the Apple Corps of Dallas. It was posted on the Apple II history site and has received a lot of hits. Check it out on Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/14948067
      —
      Thanks!
      Bye R@y

  • poppa

    oh those glory days,Blue boxes,ripping off software and other companies ideas,sounds a bit like today.

  • Sandy

    Thanks for posting this Adam! Steve mentions my home town of White Plains, NY. Wonder why her choose that city as an example? Who did he know who lived here at that time? I wonder?

    • Jon

      He mentions White Plains NY because that’s where the AT&T exchange for overseas call was, the phreakers would call the White Plains exchange to connect overseas calls.

  • http://openardilla.org grogeek

    in the same time, The blue box was an invention of Captain Crunch, 10 years before !!!

    • BobAB

      Captain crunch is a toy whistle used to be found inside the captain crunch cereal box, so happens to emit the same frequency tone, like in the blue box, that enables you to control telephone system’s computer. You can then use the regular TT keypad to issue commands to the computer. AFAIR there is a person that was also called Captain Crunch because of his ability to emit the same tone using only his mouth and he can also mimic the TT keypad tones.

  • firesign3000

    I may or may not have had one of those. ;)

  • Bruno Suárez

    Nice.

  • JG

    Why the hell does the video pan/zoom on a _Power Substation_ when it is talking about phone infrastructure?

    Hey, let’s talk about elephants and show pictures of tigers!! Same mistake.

About the author

oakbogAdam Rosen is an IT consultant specializing in Apple Macintosh systems new and old. He lives in Boston with two cats and too many possessions. In addition to membership in the Cult of Mac, Adam has written for Low End Mac and is curator of the Vintage Mac Museum. He also enjoys a good glass of Pinot Noir.

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