It was a gear that allowed users to get free phone service illegally.
Interesting, isnt it?
Lets delve further to unfold the story.
How did it all begin?
Before Wozniak and Jobs built Apple in the 1970s, both were phone phreaks.
Who is a phone phreak?
Phone phreaking got its start in the late 1950s.
It was at its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The term first referred to groups who had reverse engineered the system of tones used to route long-distance calls.
These boxes were designed in 1972 by Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak.
In older days, telephone operators used to manually connect a call to form a route of the call.
The blue box was designed to emulate this in-band signalling tones used by the telephone exchanges.
I called only to explore the phone company as a system, to learn the codes and tricks.
Id talk to the London operator, and convince her I was a New York operator.
When I called my parents and my friends, I paid.
After six months I quitId done everything that I could.
I was so pure.
Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying to make money.
But then I thought we were all pure, Wozniak had said in 1986 during an interview.
They managed to raise a total of $6,000 from selling blue boxes.
source: www.techworm.net
