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File: MERRY PRANKSTERS-WOZNIAK&JOBS
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- MERRY PRANKSTERS -
= InfoWorld -- October 1, 1984 =
- By Allan Lundell & Geneen Marie Haugen -
= Word Processed for SF][ by BIOC Agent 003 =
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Jobs and Wozniak unearth the secrets of phone phreaking
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The year was 1971. Two silent figures were observing the entrances to SLAC,
the complex that housed the Stanford Linear Accelerator. With one of the
newest, shiniest atom smashers in the world, the SLAC facility at Stanford
University was a physicist's dream -- a center for investigation into the most
basic elements of reality.
But the two observers were not interested in the nature of reality. Racing
to a side entrance, they snuck past the SLAC security patrols and entered the
high-technology library. They knew their way around, having visited the SLAC
facility several times before. It was always exciting to break in; there was
no limit to the information they could absorb.
This time, however, they were on a specific mission. Thumbing through a
document on multifrequency telecommunications systems, Steve Wozniak whispered
to his friend, Steve Jobs.
"This is it! This matches the frequencies in Esquire exactly! With this
information, we can build one!"
The future creators of the Apple II computer pulled out their pens and
notebooks, scribbling data almost faster than a high-speed line printer. This
was no minor treasure. They had unearthed some of the secrets of the little
blue box, topic of the infamous Esquire article on phone phreaks by Ron
Rosenbaum. [Esquire article on-line -- parts I - VI - SF Phreak L2 (9)]
The blue box was the magical device needed to enter and exercise control
over the world's phone system -- the world's electronic nervous system. And
now the two Steves had the access codes.
Days of intensive effort followed, until they held their first model, with
wires and coils spilling out, to the phone and punched the secret codes. After
many exasperating failures, the phone rang a long-distance number. Someone
answered....
Jobs yelled out to the person on the line: "Hello! We've got a blue box,
and we are calling you from California! Where are you located?"
A little confused, their first planetary contact yelled back: "I'm in Los
Angeles!"
The boys needed help. Now that they knew the Esquire story was truth and
not fiction, they imagined its hero, Cap'n Crunch, must be real, too. The two
Steves put out the word through the underground that they wanted to meet him.
It was some meeting. The infamous Cap'n had named himself after Cap'n
Crunch breakfast cereal when he'd discovered that their free bos'n whistle
produced a fundamental tone for long-distance calls. He also found out other
phone intelligence information he needed from Bell System publications and by
making himself obnoxious at the Bell switching offices. Cap'n Crunch was
charting the unkown seas of the phone system with the true "Star Trek" spirit
of seeing what there was, going where no man has gone before, and having fun
doing it.
Woz had imagined Crunch to be a superengineer, a consultant to the computer
industry, an ultragenius driving a van equipped to do everything but fly -- a
hybrid version of James Bond, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the professor on
"Gilligan's Island." but at this first meeting in the Berkeley dorms ol' Woz
did a double take. Standing before him was, well, a madman. With long frizzy
hair, the Crunch was wild-eyed and almost toothless, to boot, like a pirate
from the seven seas.
Cap'n Crunch launched immediately into his discoveries. After many hours
had passed, Wozniak and Jobs knew how to access different countries, overseas
information operators, satellites, and transoceanic cables.
Woz and Jobs were handed an opportunity to test out their newfound knowledge
late that night. On their way to Jobs' house in Silicon Valley, the car died
out near a phone booth in the town of Hayward. They tried to beep their way
back to Berkeley with their trusty blue box, but Woz had trouble making the
connection. He was getting very nervous trying to "explain" to the operator
what he was doing, when a police car pulled up and slammed on the brakes,
lights flashing. The office sauntered over to the phone booth, and the two
Steves knew they had been tricked by the operator. The officer, trained in the
ways of criminals caught in the act, shifted his attention to some nearby
bushes -- thinking the boys had thrown something in them. In this instant,
Jobs passed the blue box to Woz, who quickly shoved it in his coat pocket.
Brave move. But to no avail: The officer routinely searched both and
liberated them of their new tool. The officer randomly pushed buttons, and the
blue box responded: bleep, bleep, blup, bloop!
"What's this?" he demanded.
Woz took a chance: "I-it's a m-m-music synthesizer, officer."
Another police officer arrived and started trying to figure the thing out.
He grilled them: "What's the orange button?"
"That's for calibration," Jobs said. "It's designed to interface with a
computer."
The two boys were escorted into the back of the patrol cruiser. Feeling
doomed, they were beginning to realize that being a pioneer and a prankster had
its risks. Then the cop with the box turned around from the front seat and
handed them the blue box, saying, "A good idea, but a guy named Moog beat you
to it...."
There is probably no one in the computer industry who has not heard of Steve
Wozniak and Steve Jobs. A lot of people in the industry have heard of John
Draper, alias Cap'n Crunch, and a lot of people haven't. But probably everyone
in the industry -- probably everyone in Western society -- knows someone like
them: The guy with the ham radio next door. The kid down the street who
crashed his school's computer from home. The hacker in the office across the
hall who's always tampering with everyone else's files. They all seem to be
propelled by some inborn drive to do what few -- if any -- can do or have done.
These are the brethren of the high-tech frontier, the would-be merry
pranksters of computerdom. The brethren break new ground, thinking the
unthinkable, charting the unknown. Wherever their minds go, we will all go --
eventually. No one holds the future so much in their hands as the pioneers of
today's supertechnology. Thank God, they've got a sense of humor.
In the formative years of the brethren, before they'd settled on a field of
specialization, when they were young and unconsciously adventurous, they were
unaware of the strength of the cultural rules. for some of them, a
prankstering spirit could mean disaster, but Woz and Jobs seemed to live an
almost magical existence beyond the law and trouble. After mastering the blue
box, they organized blue-box parties at the Berkeley dorms. Once a week, with
an audience of 20 or 30 people, they held demonstrations. They'd call
operators in other countries and go around the world by switching from an
operator in one country to an operator in another. Finally a phone would ring
in the dorm room next door. Someone would pick up and hear Woz's voice coming
from around the world.
They'd call Dial-A-Joke in New York (Woz subsequently started his own
dial-a-joke service), weather numbers in Australia, phone booths in Cape Town,
bars in Ireland, all amplified so the entire audience could hear. Before the
night was through, everyone in the room would talk to some friend or relative
in another country -- all for free, all for fun. Woz was always thinking
up fantastic feats for the Berkeley Blue Box Show. Everyone loved him, and he
loved being the star. Before long he was calling himself Berkeley Blue and had
an almost professional routine. When whe was finished blowing away the
audience, Blue's partner Jobs, code-named "Oct Tobor," would step in and offer
shiny new blue boxes for sale -- guaranteed at a low, low price of $80. Shades
of things to come....
Woz and Jobs didn't just hand-wire their boxes. Woz created them with
state-of-the-art technology and laid them out on personally designed printed
circuit boards. This was a professional operation, a miniature high-technology
company, complete with product, sales, service, and support. Woz immersed
himself in the tech, Jobs collected the money. Those boys sold more than two
hundred boxes and lived off the revenues for an entire school year.
A charmed life, some might say. But then the blue-box luck ran out. One
night Woz and Jobs stopped at a pizza parlor practically next door to Woz'a
elementary school in the Silicon Valley town of Sunnyvale. They were on their
way to Berkeley to sell a blue box, but they need some money right away and
thoght they might save themselves the trip by selling it in Sunnyvale. Almost
eeryone feels safe in a familiar haunt in his hometown, and Jobs and Woz were
no exception. Chewing their pizza, they surveyed the customers at the other
tables. The families were out of the question. So were the tables full of
teenagers.
But there were some really disreputable-looking characters at another table
who looked as if they might be able to put the blue box to good use. Feeling
confident, Wozniak and Jobs approached the table and had a low conversation
about the merits of the box. Were they interested? They were interested all
right. And they were hooked after they watched the demonstration. They didn't
have the money right then, so they took Woz and Jobs out to their car under the
pretext of giving them their business card.
The only problem was that the business card was a gun. That blue box
changed ownership pretty fast, and the shady characters drove off. They had
the box -- but they didn't know how to use it, and Woz and Jobs never told
them. The secrets of Cap'n Crunch were safe.
In 1974, Cap'n Crunch, aka John Draper, was busted for blue-boxing. For the
second time. By federal, state, and local authorities. Fraud by wire was the
charge. He had already spent six months in a federal penitentiary in
Pennsylvania. The second time, he was sent to Lompoc -- a federal pen in
California.
The likable yet unfortunate Cap'n. How could he have know when he learned
how to make free long-distance calls from blind kids who whistled their
frequencies into the phone, that he'd do time? How could he have know that the
Cap'n Crunch cereal that inspired the blue box would lead to this? How could
he have know when he blue-boxed his way to Nixon's bedside to inform the
president of the nation's toilet paper crisis that he might end up in the
slammer?
In Lompoc an inside informer for the Mafia broke [the Cap'n's] back when he
refused to impart the secrets of the blue box. That was the end of Cap'n
Crunch but not of John Draper -- a man described by Wozniak as being wanted by
the FBI because he was "too intelligent." If Draper hadn't been made such a
folk hero by the press, it might not have gone badly for him. Then again, his
final stay in jail led him to computer fame and fortune. It was while he was
in a work program that he wrote Easy Writer, the first professional-style word
processing program for the Apple.
A couple of years later, IBM was looking around for software to bundle with
its PC. By that time, there were better packages than Easy Writer, but someone
at IBM had a sense of humor. IBM asked Draper and his new software company,
Cap'n Software, to design and program this now classic word processing package
for its first entry into the personal computer market -- an irony not lost on
those familiar with his bouts with AT&T.
After their brushes with the dark side of the force, John Draper, Stephen
Wozniak, and Steve Jobs got a whole lot smarter. They wised up to some of the
mysterious workings of the power structures. They lost their innocence, but
they gained something else.
Wozniak and Jobs struck it rich early in the Silicon Rush. They made
history with their Volkswagen-like Apple II. John Draper became wealthy enough
to drive a Mercedes-Benz through the streets of Berkeley with his first release
of Easy Writer for the Apple II.
New fortunes are still being made regularly in Silicon Valley, if not as
often as they once were. And empires that once were, already are no longer.
A new crop of microcomputer genius-pranksters is making headlines. Their
exploits have inspired movies and a television show. As technology's first
wave of pranksters comes of age, they are shifting their curiosity to things
that are, as Wozniak explains, "creative and useful." But they're still doing
things that few -- if any -- have done. Wozniak sponsored live satellite
linkups with the Soviet Union at his outdoor musical US Festivals. Draper is
masterminding a vast artificial intelligence network. Some of the others early
pioneers are funding private space programs. Some are pursuing medical
applications such as life extension. Others are entering the arena of
politics.
In the realm of genius-pranksters and supertechnology, just about anything
is still possible.
Putting the most powerful tools into the hands of individuals with
creativity, integrity, and courage is bound to have awesome consequences. When
the real whiz kids get together to conspire, they create not simply pranks, but
miracles... <>
[Courtesy of Sherwood Forest ][ -- (914) 359-1517]
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