The Story of Phone Phreaking and the Steve Jobs and Wozniak Blue Box (Video)

Phone phreaking. It was a thing in the 1970s. At least that's what I thought until I saw this video. It turns out phreaking began in the 1950s. Who knew? Turns out the folks featured in this video knew, and that includes Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, whose first entrepreneurial venture was building "blue boxes." Phreaking was the trick of using audio tones to control AT&T's phone system to make calls anywhere in the world for free. Now to the young folks among us, that won't be a big deal, but long distance calls back in the day cost a lot of money. And that helped make phreaking the system a huge turn-on to the hackers of the time, including Messrs. Jobs and Woz. The video includes an old interview with Steve Jobs talking about making blue boxes, and it features both an old and new interview with Mr. Wozniak, too. Captain Crunch also makes an appearance, as do many other figures that played a role in this pre-personal computing hacker community. It's great. Watch it. [Note that playback may not work on iPhones, but it works fine on iPad.]

Check It Out: The Story of Phone Phreaking and the Steve Jobs and Wozniak Blue Box (Video)