iWoz

by Steve Wozniak

  That same year, an issue of Ramparts magazine came out with a really well-explained and completely illustrated article on how to build a Black Box with about two dollars’ worth of parts from Radio Shack. All you needed were a capacitor, a resistor, and a switch or push button.

  Here’s how it worked: when someone called you longdistance you pushed the button to briefly tell the local phone company that you were answering. This connected the faraway line to your own. Because you didn’t answer for two seconds minimum, the local phone company didn’t send back a billing signal. Yet you were still connected to the caller, and the capacitor of the Black Box allowed their voice to reach your phone (and vice versa) without the phone company sensing any sort of connection. This device worked very well. In fact, one pole-vaulter in my dorm got a letter one day from his parents wondering why they hadn’t been billed for two calls from Florida.

  By the way, the phone company sued Ramparts after the article ran and drove it out of business by 1975.

  • o •

  So while I’m playing with Black Boxes and spreading the word about the Blue Boxes, I started to seriously go to work on my own design. Only this time I tried a digital Blue Box design, which I knew would be able to produce precise, reliable tones. Looking back, I see that it was just a radical idea to do a digital Blue Box. In fact, I never saw or heard about another digital Blue Box. Making it digital meant I could make it extremely small and it was always going to work because it was based on a crystal clock to keep it accurate. That’s the same way, by the way, watch crystals keep your watch running correctly.

  I already had really good design skills by this point. I mean, I’d been designing and redesigning computers on paper all the way through high school and my last two years of college. I knew so much about circuit design, probably more than anyone I knew.

  And then one day I did it. I designed my own digital Blue Box.

  It was great. I swear to this day—the day I’m telling you this and the day you’re reading it—I have never designed a circuit I was prouder of: a set of parts that could do three jobs at once instead of two. I still think it was incredible.

  You see, the circuit, which generated codes corresponding to which button you pushed, used the chips in a very unusual way.

  The way all electronics works, including chips, is that some signals are sent to the electronics, to their inputs. And the resulting signals come out of the chip on connections called outputs. Now, because I was familiar with the internal circuitry of the chips, I knew that tiny signals were actually being emitted by the inputs. After those tiny signals went through my button coding circuit, I directed them to a transistor amplifier, which supplied power to turn the chips on. So you can see the amazing thing. (At least, you can see it if you’re an engineer.) The chips had to supply a signal to turn them on, and they did. That signal came from one side of the battery being connected, but not the other side.

  I never have been able to do anything this out-of-the-box in any of my designs in my career at Hewlett-Packard or at Apple. That’s saying a lot, because my designs have always been noted for being out-of-the-box. But this was cleverer than anything.

  • o •

  Now, I won’t say that getting a Blue Box working was just an instant thing. That’s not what happens in engineering. I was in school, taking classes, and it was probably a couple of months before I did this design. But once I designed it, building it took a day.

  I brought it to Steve’s house, and we tried it on his phone there. It actually worked. Our first Blue Box call was to a number in Orange County, California—to a random stranger.

  And Steve kept yelling, “We’re calling from California! From California! With a Blue Box.” He didn’t realize that the 714 area code was California!

  Instantly we got in my car and drove up from Steve’s house to the dorm at Berkeley. We had promised our parents, who all knew about the project, that we would never do it from home. That one call to Orange County would be the only illegal one from either of our parents’ houses.

  I wanted to do the right thing. I didn’t want to steal from the phone company—I wanted to do what the Esquire article said phone phreaks did: use their system to exploit flaws in the system. These days, phone phreaks shun those who do it to steal.

  Also, I would’ve died to meet Captain Crunch, who was really the center of it all. Or any phone phreak; it just seemed so impossible that I’d ever meet anyone else with a Blue Box.

  • o •

  One day Steve Jobs called me and said that Captain Crunch had actually done an interview on the Los Gatos radio station KTAO.

  I said, “Oh my god, I wonder if there’s any way to get in touch

  with him.” Steve said he’d already left a message at the station but Captain Crunch hadn’t called back.

  We knew we just had to get in touch with this most famous— infamous, really—and brilliant engineering criminal in the world. After all, he was the guy we’d been obsessed with for months; he was the guy we’d been reading about and telling stories about. We left messages at KTAO but never heard back from Captain Crunch. It looked like a dead end.

  But then, the most coincidental thing happened. A friend of mine from high school, David Hurd, called me and wanted to catch up. When he came up to visit, I started to tell him all these incredible Captain Crunch stories and about the Blue Box and he said, “Well, don’t tell anyone, but I know who Captain Crunch is.” And I looked at him, floored. How could some random friend from high school know who Captain Crunch was?

  I said, “What?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, “I know who he is. His real name is John Draper and he works at a radio station, KKUP in Cupertino.”

  The next weekend, I was sitting with Steve at his house and told him what I’d found out. Steve immediately called the station and asked the guy who answered, “Is John Draper there?” He didn’t even say Captain Crunch.

  But the guy said, “No, he dropped out of sight after the Esquire article.”

  Hearing that, we knew we’d found the real Captain Crunch. We left our phone number with the guy just on the off chance that Captain Crunch might call us back. And in about five minutes, Captain Crunch actually called!

  We picked up the phone, and he immediately told us who he was. But he said he didn’t want to say much on the phone. (I remember how, in the Esquire article, he had seemed pretty paranoid, sure that the phone line he was talking to the reporter on was bugged.)

  Then we told him what kind of equipment we had, what we’d built. I told him it was a Blue Box that I myself had designed, and that it was digital. And he said, again, “Well, I can’t talk on the phone about this, but I will come meet you in your dorm.”

  Man, I drove back to Berkeley just shaking the whole way. When I got there, I was telling everyone who’d listen, “Wow! Captain Crunch is coming here!” This guy I had made into a superhero—the hero of technology bandits or whatever you’d call him—the head guy, the best-known guy, was coming to my dorm room! And everybody was saying, “Can I come?”

  But I said, no, no, I knew Captain Crunch wouldn’t like that. So it was just my roommate, John Gott, Steve Jobs, and I who sat there in my dorm room, waiting and waiting.

  Now, for some reason I was expecting this suave ladies’ man to come through the door. I think it was because I’d read in the Esquire article that he’d tapped his girlfriend’s phone line once and heard her talking to another guy, and then he called her up and said, “We’re done.” Just having a girlfriend, I guess, made him a ladies’ man to me. I still had never even had a girlfriend.

  But no. Captain Crunch comes to our door, and it turns out he’s just this really weird-looking guy. Here, I thought, would be a guy who would look and act just far away and above any engineer in the world, but there he was: sloppy-looking, with his hair kind of hanging down one side. And he smelled like he hadn’t taken a shower in two weeks, which turned out to be true. He was also missing a bunch of teeth. (
Over the years, the joke I made up about him was that the reason he had no teeth was that he was stripping phone lines with them when the phone rang. Engineers know that the phone ringing signal is a high enough voltage to shock you really hard.)

  So anyway, I saw him, and he didn’t match my expectations. So I asked, “Are you Captain Crunch?” And he said, “I am he,” and

  he walked in just majestically. What a line that was. “I am he.” And there he was.

  He turned out to be this really strange, fun guy, just bubbling over with energy. And he’s sitting on the bed, looking at all my phone phreak articles taped to my wall, and all the circuits and magazines, and also weird things like the twenty pounds of saltines I’d swiped from the cafeteria by stuffing a few packets in my pockets at every meal.

  And he looked around and saw wires coming out of the telephones; I could tell he was surprised. I was sitting there thinking: Wow, this is the most amazing night of my life of all time, and it’s just beginning!

  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 longdistance number from Hayward—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 longdistance 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.