Return to the Little Kingdom (11 page)

Unable to tame the vagaries of the wave forms and analog circuitry of oscillators, Wozniak turned his attention to a digital design. Though a digital blue box was far trickier to build than an oscillator, it provided more precise tones. Wozniak was spurred by the informal competition that had developed among phone phreaks to build compact blue boxes. He had to design circuits that would convert pressure on the push buttons into clear, consistent tones. To help with some of the arithmetic he wrote a program to run on one of the Berkeley computers.

After some weeks, he had wired his first digital blue box. Thanks to a clever trick, the box, which contained a small speaker that ran off a 9-voIt battery, didn’t have a special power switch. Any of the push buttons turned on the power. Jobs and Wozniak tried to place their first call to Wozniak’s grand-mother in Los Angeles but managed to dial the wrong number, presumably leaving some disconcerted Angeleno wondering why anyone should shriek, “It actually works. It actually works. We called you for free.”

For Wozniak and Jobs, cornering Captain Crunch, tracking down the uncrowned King of the Phreaks, became as obsessive as the quest to build a reliable box. They called the author of the
Esquire
story who politely refused to reveal Crunch’s real name. Jobs then heard that Crunch had given an interview on a Los Gatos FM radio station. So the pair trooped off to the station and again were told that the name couldn’t be disclosed. Finally, the world of phreaking being small and intimate, another Berkeley phreak told Wozniak that he had worked with Captain Crunch at KKUP, an FM radio station in Cupertino, and that his real name was John Draper. Jobs called KKUP, asked for Draper, and was told by the receptionist that he could leave a message. A few minutes later the phone rang: Captain Crunch speaking. They made a date to meet in Wozniak’s dormitory room at Berkeley, where he had enrolled in 1971, a few nights later.

What virtually amounted to a papal visit was treated as such. When Jobs arrived from Los Altos, Wozniak was sitting on the edge of his bed scarcely able to conceal his excitement, and several others were waiting for the knock on the door. When they heard the sound Wozniak opened the door to find a ragged figure standing in the corridor. He wore jeans and sneakers, had hair that ran amok, an unshaven face, eyes that squinted, and several missing teeth. Wozniak recalled: “He looked absolutely horrid and I said, ‘Are you Captain Crunch?’” Draper replied: “I am he.” Despite his quirky mannerisms and his scabrous looks Draper provided a full evening’s education. He started playing tricks on the dorm phone, made some international telephone calls, checked out a few dial-a-joke services and recorded weather forecasts in foreign cities.

He also showed his listeners how to “stack tandems” by bouncing a call from one tandem to another in different cities across America, finishing with a call to a telephone across the hallway. Once the telephonic chain reaction was created, Draper hung up the one phone while Jobs and Wozniak listened at the phone that rang across the dorm hallway. They heard the tandems hanging up along the echoing line as the call cascaded to a close: k-chig-a-chig-a-chig; k-chig-a-chig-a-chig.

The lessons continued after they adjourned to Kips, a Berkeley Pizza Parlor. Draper was impressed by Wozniak’s blue box: “It never drifted and never needed tuning but it sounded a bit tinny.” Draper gave Jobs and Wozniak numbers of other phone phreaks, special telephone numbers, country codes, undersea-cable codes, satellite codes, access codes. He barraged them with details of toll switching trunks, conference bridges, routing indicators, supervisory signals, and traffic service position stations. Draper warned Wozniak and Jobs never to carry a blue box around and to make blue-box calls only from pay phones. Wozniak thought: “It was the most astounding meeting we’d ever had.”

The same evening on their way back to Los Altos (where Wozniak had left his car) Jobs’s red Fiat broke down. For the first time they used their blue box from a pay phone near a freeway ramp and tried to reach Draper who was heading in the same direction. They dialed an operator to get an 800 number and started to get the jitters when she called back to check whether they were still on the line. Jobs tucked the blue box away and was dialing a legal call when a police car pulled up alongside. The policemen ordered them out of the booth and started inspecting the bushes and shrubs. Just before they were ordered against a wall with their legs astride to be patted down, Jobs slipped Wozniak the blue box, which was soon uncovered.

Finally, satisfied that the long-haired pair weren’t carrying any drugs, the policemen gave Jobs and Wozniak a ride back along the freeway. One of the policemen pivoted in his seat, returned the blue box, and said: “Too bad. A guy named Moog beat you to it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jobs said, “he sent us the schematics.”

To cap off the night, Wozniak picked up his Ford Pinto from the Jobs house and was headed back up the Nimitz Freeway toward Berkeley when he dozed off and destroyed the car after ramming it into the crash barriers.

Wozniak and Jobs plumped on suitable names for their new pursuit. The first chose the safe sounding Berkeley Blue while the latter decided to call himself Oaf Tobark. By the end of his first quarter at Berkeley Wozniak was fully occupied with blue boxes. He began to collect magazine articles and newspaper stories, pasted the better clips to the wall, and found the printed matter most illuminating. He subscribed to a newsletter published by TAP, the Technological American Party, and was aware of other underground journals like
TEL,
the
Telephone Electronics Line,
and of cells like “Phone Phreaks International” and “Phone Phreaks of America.” But for the most part he and Jobs floated on the periphery of a circle that attracted the sort of people who studied computers at MIT, hung around the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford, and knew about computer files that provided the latest phreaking tricks.

Wozniak and Jobs were much more interested in practical matters and in expanding their collection of gadgets than in lingering around a university. Following instructions printed in Abbie Hoffman’s
Steal This Book
and the left-wing magazine
Ramparts,
Wozniak equipped himself with a black box that allowed free incoming calls and a red box that simulated the sound of coins dropping into a pay phone.

But the most lucrative and amusing part of the arms collection was the blue box. Wozniak soon showed its virtues to his friends. He displayed its power to Allen Baum at two phone booths near Homestead High School. Wozniak phoned one booth from the other which allowed Baum to say hello into one receiver and scamper around to hear his greeting echo through the other. Wozniak made some calls to his sister who was working on a kibbutz in Israel. On Jobs’s urging the pair turned a pastime into a small business and began selling the devices. “He wanted money,” Wozniak said of his partner.

The pair employed their own marketing techniques for uncovering customers and boosting sales. They crept along the corridors of male dormitories at Berkeley (convinced that few women would be interested in their little device), knocking on doors and measuring the response to their rehearsed patter. “Is George here?” one of them would ask cagily. “George?” came the surprised response. “Yeah, George. You know the blue-box guy. The guy who does the phone tricks. The guy who has the blue box to make free long-distance phone calls.” Jobs and Wozniak watched the expression of their potential customer. If they were greeted with puzzled, timid looks they apologized for knocking on the wrong door and padded off down the hallway. If their ploy provoked a curious response, the potential customer was invited to attend a blue-box demonstration.

After a few weeks the dormitory sales pitches assumed a pattern. Wozniak hooked a tape recorder to the telephone with some alligator clips and he and Jobs explained the basic principles of the blue box. Then they followed up with a display of its power. Wozniak, in particular, relished being the center of attention. “It was a big show-off thing.” They called the home numbers of friends and relatives of some of their audience in the United States. Then they started phoning overseas and finally they tried to build a global link—starting in Berkeley and bouncing through operators in several countries—and finishing at another nearby Berkeley telephone. On one occasion Jobs used the box to make room reservations for a large party at the Ritz Hotel in London and, unable to suppress his giggles, handed the receiver to Wozniak. Another time Wozniak said that he pretended to be Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and phoned the Vatican asking to be connected to the Pontiff. A Vatican functionary explained that the Pope was still asleep but that somebody would be dispatched to wake him. Another official came on the line and tumbled to the ruse.

The demonstrations provoked curiosity and Jobs and Wozniak made cassette tapes of tones that friends would need to call their favorite long-distance numbers. The evening shows also produced orders. The pair came to an informal agreement about the manufacture of the blue boxes. Jobs arranged a supply of about $40 worth of parts and Wozniak took about four hours to wire a box which was then sold for about $150. To cut down on the time it took to build boxes the pair decided to stop wiring the boxes by hand and to have a printed circuit board made. Instead of spending four hours wiring a box, Wozniak could now finish a box within an hour. He also added another feature that turned one button into an automatic dialer. A small speaker and battery were attached to the printed circuit board, a keypad glued to the lid, and when all was finished, a card bearing a message written in purple felt pen was taped to the bottom. It read “He’s got the whole world in his hand” and it was linked to an informal guarantee. Wozniak promised that if a faulty box was returned and still contained the card he would repair it free of charge.

 

After about a year Jobs, through a combination of boredom and fear of the possible consequences, bowed out of the business. There were, after all, only so many relatives, friends, weather recordings, automatic clocks, and dial-a-jokes to call. There was also good reason to be anxious: The telephone companies were cracking down hard on the phreaks and employed security agents to snap photographs at phone-phreak conventions, placed houses under surveillance, installed tracing equipment at switching stations, rewarded informants, paid double agents and launched occasional raids. Sinister aspects and disquieting rumors accompanied the pastime. Some phone phreaks even placed tarantulas in the mail boxes of security agents and there was talk of organized crime taking an unseemly interest in the lucrative nature of the business.

Jobs was also suspicious of Captain Crunch. Draper’s frantic tone, his habit of interrupting phone conversations with emergency calls, his hysterical behavior when cigarettes were lit, and his invitations to physical exercise sessions made Jobs wary. “He was spaced out and weird.” Jobs thought that the legend, portrayed in the
Esquire
article, ran ahead of the facts. Even the bootleg 65-watt FM radio station San Jose Free Radio that Draper broadcast most weekends from the back of a van parked in the hills near the Lick Observatory didn’t compensate for his quirks. Jobs’s judgment was borne out. Though Jobs didn’t know it at the time, General Telephone had placed a trace on Draper’s telephone to tape his outgoing calls. Among the names and telephone numbers eventually handed over to the FBI was that of the Jobs household. In 1972 Draper was convicted of a wire-fraud charge but escaped with a $1,000 fine and five years of probation. The hobby also proved dangerous in another way. Preparing to sell a box one evening in a parking lot outside a Sunnyvale pizza parlor, Jobs suddenly found himself staring at a customer with a gun. “There were eighteen hundred things I could do but every one had some probability that he would shoot me in the stomach.” Jobs handed over the blue box.

For a while Wozniak ran the business by himself. He discovered other tricks, such as how to make free calls from the telephones that hotels and car-rental firms leave at airports. On occasion he also tapped the housemother’s phone at Berkeley and listened in on conversations at the FBI office in San Francisco. For about a year before their interest petered out and the phone company started to refine its switching equipment, Jobs and Wozniak switched roles. The former kept his distance while Wozniak took orders at his parents’ house and casually minded the operation. Nevertheless he split with Jobs the $6,000 or so that he earned from the sale of about two hundred blue boxes: “It was my business and Steve got half of it.”

A couple of Wozniak’s friends distributed the boxes around Berkeley while a high-school student who masqueraded under the name Johnny Bagel helped arrange sales in Beverly Hills. Some of Wozniak’s blue boxes wound up in the hands of international swindler Bernie Cornfeld and rock singer Ike Turner. At times the distributors harassed Wozniak who became bored with the repetitive assembly work. He took to ordering parts from electronics distributors under an assumed name and sometimes flew to Los Angeles to deliver blue boxes, checking his small suitcase as baggage to avoid the airport X-ray detector. On one occasion his attempts at subterfuge ended in confused embarrassment. He booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles under the name Pete Rose, oblivious to the fact that it belonged to one of the best-known major-league baseball players. Wozniak arrived at the airport, told the ticketing agent he was picking up a ticket for Pete Rose, and then discovered that he didn’t have enough cash for the ticket but also didn’t want to pay with a check that carried his real name.