Prior to founding a tiny little company called Apple, Steves Jobs and Wozniak were “phone phreakers” — selling illegal blue boxes to help people make free long-distance phone calls.
While both quickly turned their back on their law-breaking ways, Jobs noted that, “If we hadn’t made those little blue boxes, there might never have been an Apple computer.”
The entire saga is now the subject of a short documentary, featuring new interviews with Woz, alongside notable phone phreaks Charlie Pine, Tony Lauck, and John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper. Check it out below.
The whole blue box story isn’t exactly a secret if you’ve read any book about early Apple (it’s included in Jobs’ authorized biography, as well as Wozniak’s iWoz autobiography), but this documentary is so nicely put together that I thought it would be of interest to readers.
More please!
Source: FiveThirtyEight
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
