Return to the Little Kingdom (10 page)

Sunnyvale Electronics, Radio Shack, and other stores like Solid State Music were dwarfed by Haltek, which occupied a block long, light-chocolate building in Mountain View across the freeway from three brobdingnagian hangars the navy had built in the 1930s to house airships. From the outside it looked like an army mess hall. Inside it was an electronic junkyard which, like all junkyards, was a cross between a graveyard and a maternity ward. The haggling at the front counter and the thick parts catalogs mounted in folders with steel spines gave some sense of supply and demand in the world of electronics. Some items, usually small and cheap parts, were brand new, but it usually took a few months for the latest parts to filter down to Haltek. However, the store also carried the electronic equivalent of dinosaur teeth: vacuum tubes. A customer certainly had to know what he was after and even the experienced rifler couldn’t always know whether a part was made in the United States or the Far East. It was the sort of place where electrical engineers stopping by after work would bump into youngsters perched on the top of metal steps rummaging for the perfect switch among a selection of cherry switches, push switches, alternating-action push switches, lighted-lever switches, push-pull switches, and slide switches.

Narrow aisles were shaded by wooden shelves mounted on metal frames that reached from a concrete floor to a ceiling carrying grimy pipes and dusty neon lights. Hundreds of thousands of parts filled bins fashioned out of old cardboard cartons. Some of the cartons sprouted spasticated leads. Resistors lay packed in rolls while there were entire shelves devoted solely to capacitors. The more expensive pieces of equipment were housed in glass cases or along more hallowed aisles. Some had exotic names like the Leeds and Northrup Speedomax and the Honeywell Digitest. Even generators, which convert mechanical energy into electrical energy, had as many varieties as the rose: signal and sweep, multisweep, ligna sweep, and (a hybrid) varisweep. According to one frequent visitor, wandering around a surplus store like Haltek “was like walking around an immense tool kit. It gave you an idea of what was possible.” It was also a place where the engineers came to hear about the reputations of machines that needed piano movers and others that were lighter than a leaf.

Jobs spent some weekends working behind the counter at Halted Specialties located in Sunnyvale. He became familiar with the value and going rate for parts ranging from the latest semiconductor chips to measurement instruments. At one point he astonished Wozniak when the pair spent a Saturday morning sorting through the pickings at the San Jose Flea Market, a vast combination of garage sale and country fair which seemed to attract every scavenger south of San Francisco. Jobs bought some transistors which he later resold—at a profit—to his boss at Halted. Wozniak recalled: “I thought it was a flaky idea but he knew what he was doing.”

 

But there was a lot more to Jobs’s life than electronics. He was curious and adventurous and open to the sensations of life. He spent as much time dabbling with artistic and literary pursuits as he did with frequency counters and laser beams. He was attracted by literature and classic movies, studied some Shakespeare, idolized his English teacher, and was enchanted with movies like
The Red Balloon
. When swimming practice started to devour too much of his time, he quit and took up water polo but abandoned that when the coach encouraged him to knee opponents in the groin. “I wasn’t a jock. I was a loner for the most part.” Some high-school contemporaries, like Stephen Wozniak’s younger brother, Mark, thought Jobs was “really strange.” For a time he played the trumpet in the school marching band.

With a few friends he formed an offbeat group called the Buck Fry Club whose name could be unraveled into an obscene message. They painted a toilet seat gold and cemented it on a planter and they hoisted a Volkswagen Beetle onto the roof of the school cafeteria.

At the end of Jobs’s junior year he, Wozniak, and Baum engineered a stunt for the graduating class: a king-sized sheet, tie-dyed in the school’s green and white colors, which unfurled down the side of a building to reveal a giant hand giving a time-honored gesture. Baum’s mother painted the hand, having been told that it was a Brazilian good-luck sign. At the bottom of the sheet the three combined their initials! SWABJOB PRODUCTIONS. It wasn’t long after Jobs was summoned to the principal’s office to do some explaining that Paul Jobs arrived to act a counsel for the defense.

 

Steven Jobs also ventured farther afield in both body and spirit. The arrival of his first car, a red Fiat coupe that Paul Jobs considered small, cramped and unreliable, made it easier to leave Los Altos. Jobs found that his car let him visit friends. Unlike many high-school students—when a difference of a year seems like a decade—Jobs was friendly with people several years his senior. A couple were students at Berkeley while one or two others attended Stanford. Jobs took to driving his temperamental car across San Francisco Bay to Berkeley and he also liked lingering around the Stanford University coffee shop. The forays into a larger world broadened his general interest. He started to experiment with sleep deprivation and several times stayed up for a couple of consecutive nights. He started smoking marijuana and hashish, took to puffing on a pipe, and left the drugs in the car where his father happened on them.

As a high-school senior Jobs met his first serious girl friend. The object of his attentions, Nancy Rogers, trailed him by a year because she had spent two years in second grade. With long fawn hair, green eyes, and high cheekbones, she had a bohemian edge and a compelling fragility. Rogers lived two blocks from Homestead in a house where her mother and father, an engineer in GTE Sylvania’s Electronics Systems Division, were engaged in bitter squabbles. “I was going through turmoil because my family was splitting up. Steve was kind of crazy. That’s why I was attracted to him.” Her father thought, “Nancy needed someone she could latch onto and Steve was kind to her.” The pair met while Rogers was working on an animated movie which the school authorities did not look kindly on. To escape surveillance, much of the movie work was done after midnight in the shuttered school buildings. A few students, like Jobs, dropped by with lights and stereos. Wozniak, who observed some of these activities from a distance, harbored wild (and unfounded) speculations that his younger friend was engaged in the production of pornographic epics.

Jobs and Rogers became high-school sweethearts. In Jobs’s final year of high school they played hooky, spent afternoons drinking wine, and talking. It was as bucolic an existence as suburban Santa Clara would allow. Jobs dropped his first LSD with Nancy in a wheat field. “It was great. I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful experience of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat field.”

When he graduated from high school Jobs was thin and lean. The combination of long dark hair and a sparse beard convinced his mother not to buy more than one graduation photograph. After leaving Homestead, Jobs decided to spend the summer living with Nancy. The pair rented a room in a small cabin in the hills overlooking Cupertino and Los Altos. Nancy recalled, “It wasn’t a great statement. We just did it. Steve was headstrong so we could do it and my parents were falling apart so I could do it. We were really in love.” Jobs announced the move to his parents.

Jobs and Rogers shared a romantic teenage summer. There were strolls to peer through the gates of the Maryknoll Seminary and long walks on Baldi Hill where Rogers painted a picture of a black woman on a wooden post. Jobs tried his hand at poetry, picked at a guitar, and along with Wozniak, was attracted by the music of Bob Dylan. They found a store in Santa Cruz that specialized in Dylan esoterica and sold reprints of songbooks, magazine profiles, and bootleg tapes of recording sessions and European concerts. They took some of the Dylan songbooks to SLAC where they copied them on a Xerox machine. There was also the occasional disaster where family ties came in handy. When Jobs’s Fiat short-circuited and caught fire on Skyline Drive, his father, towed it home. To help pay for the damage to the car and keep ends together Jobs, Wozniak, and Rogers found jobs at San Jose’s Westgate Shopping Center, where they donned heavy costumes and, for three dollars an hour, paraded around a children’s fairyland in a concrete
Alice in Wonderland
. Though Wozniak reveled in the activity, Jobs took a more jaundiced view: “The costumes weighed a ton. After about four hours you’d want to wipe out some kids.” Nancy played Alice. Wozniak and Jobs took turns masquerading as the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter.

I
n a litigious, Victorian English, American Telephone and Telegraph made its policy absolutely clear: “No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device not furnished by the Telephone Company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the Telephone Company.” Dr. No, Cheshire Cat, The Snark, Cap’n Crunch, Alefnull, The Red King, and Peter Perpendicular Pimple disagreed. They were phone phreaks who spent their lives perfecting blue boxes—electronic gadgets the size of cigarette packets—which they used to make free long-distance telephone calls and tease, outwit, and infuriate the biggest company on earth.

At the time, and especially in later years, the excuses for playing around with blue boxes and the mighty telephone system were as diverse and imaginative as the nicknames. The blue box offered an opportunity to explore the largest collection of computers devised by man. It provided a worldwide introduction to the marriage of hardware and software. It was an intellectual exercise. It was a challenge. It brought satisfaction. It grabbed people’s attention. It appealed to a passion for power. It was a privilege to converse with some of the legendary phone phreaks. Some even liked to explain, with straight faces, that there were practical advantages. Blue boxes, they said, provided quieter, more direct circuits than the phone company could furnish. And though they knew it was illegal very few admitted that they were stealing from AT&T, GTE, or any of the hundreds of small, independent telephone companies. “We thought it was absolutely incredible,” Steve Jobs explained, “that you could build this little box and make phone calls around the world.”

Jobs and Wozniak were inadvertently turned into blue-box builders when Margaret Wozniak glanced at an article in
Esquire
that she thought would appeal to her older son. She was right. About a fifth the length of a respectable-sized book, the piece was called “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” and was subtitled “A story so incredible it may even make you feel sorry for the phone company.” The story, published in October 1971, was guaranteed to stir anybody’s sense of the fantastic but especially teenagers who had made dummy bombs out of oscillators and played laser beams on bedroom windows.

It told of an underground society composed of phreaks scattered all across America in pools of emotional loneliness whose best companions were voices at the other end of telephone lines. Among the notable characters were Joe Engressia, a blind man in his early twenties who could fool telephone switching equipment by the clarity of his whistle, and Captain Crunch who assumed his name after discovering that the sound from plastic whistles given away in a Cap’n Crunch cereal promotion could be used to help make free toll calls. The 2,600-hertz tone produced by the whistle happened to coincide with the basic signal used by the phone company to direct long-distance calls.

Wozniak tore through the story, intrigued by the authentic ring of the technical detail and the way it dripped with references to frequencies and cycles. Before he had even finished he called Jobs, who was still a sophomore at Homestead High School, and started reading chunks from the magazine. Telephones and the telephone system weren’t anything that the pair had given any serious thought to but blue boxes were clearly electronic and they promised to perform a more than useful function. The
Esquire
story started the pair on a paper chase and a four-month quest to build a reliable blue box. They peeled up to Palo Alto and rummaged among the stacks in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center library looking for books that might offer more clues. The telephone company, alarmed by the detail revealed in the story, had asked libraries to remove technical telephone manuals from their shelves. Many of the manuals like
The Bell System Telephone Journal
and
The Bell Laboratories Record
where proud scientists had revealed the most intimate details of their work had disappeared. Most of the shelves at SLAC had been picked clean, but the purgers had missed a few vital works and Wozniak and Jobs found the CCITT Masterdata book which had survived the purge. They scoured the index for references to multifrequency tones and descriptions of how to build the circuits that emitted the tones, checked the details, and found that they matched the descriptions given in the
Esquire
story.

Building a reliable blue box was quite another matter. To start, the pair decided to build an oscillator to generate tones that they planned to record on cassette tape. They designed an oscillator from some circuits described in
Popular Electronics
but soon discovered that it was incredibly difficult to get stable tones. Oscillators were temperamental and susceptible to changes in temperature and the telephone company’s equipment wasn’t tolerant of shoddy work. They spent hours tuning the oscillator by hand, trying to hit the right notes and Jobs measured the results with his frequency counter. Finally, they recorded the tones they needed to make telephone calls but still couldn’t get the cassette recorder to fool the phone company.