“He Told Me About How The Blue Box Article Had Inspired Him”

Quite a while ago, I posted an excerpt from Ron Rosenbaum’s seminal 1971 Esquire blue-box article, which inspired the young Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) to become phone phreaks and begin their little computer company. At Slate, Rosenbaum recalls meeting Jobs in the ’80s and learning of his role in the birth of Apple. An excerpt:

“The lunch with Jobs took place in a huge hangar-like restaurant—then-fashionable, now-defunct—called, I swear, ‘America.’ I had been doing a story about California surfer-styled ad man Jay Chiat, the one who devised the Apple’s turning-point ‘1984’ ad, depicting a lithe young woman hurling a hammer at a screen upon which an evil looking Big Brother-type was delivering a harangue. The ad captured—or created—the Apple ethos of rebellion against the tyranny of conformity.

Anyway Jobs was in town and he came to the lunch with Chiat, and after the introductions, he told me about how the blue box article had inspired him and Wozniak. How they’d taken down the cycles-per-second of the tones AT&T used to translate phone numbers into audio signals, some of which I’d disclosed in the article, and how they’d found the others in some obscure technical journals and had begun building their own blue boxes, hoping to sell them on the underground market. (Gamblers and mobsters liked to use them to keep their communications outside the system.)

Even then, at that lunch, Jobs displayed his characteristic design sensibility when talking about these illicit gadgets. Some of the sleeker ones were about the size of cigarette pack, with silvery keyboard panels—not too different in appearance from the later iPod—and I remember his keen interest in what model, what design, I’d gotten hold of.

But he came across as a very level-headed guy, unpretentious even though his company was then blowing up big time. I remember being gratified at my story having some influence, and indeed I put Jobs’ revelation into the story about Chiat, but it was cut by an otherwise astute editor. Jobs just wasn’t that important then.”

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Jobs tells the blue-box story:

Another Ron Rosenbaum post:

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