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Slate Reprints Blue-Box Article That Inspired Jobs
Slate has reprinted the piece that Ron Rosenbaum wrote for Esquire in 1971, explaining to the world that there was an underground movement of people hacking the phone system. (Rosenbaum is now a columnist for Slate.) According to the article's new introduction and followup piece by Rosenbaum reflecting on its impact — and to the New York Times obituary for Steve Jobs — this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.
Hate this article? Don't worry! Unlike Bitcoin, HTML5 or Linux, the obituaries and tributes will stop being published eventually. Steve Jobs is dead and not coming back...
WAIT NOOOOOOOOO I JINXED IT STEVE ZOMBS
dead or alive. really please stop worshiping Apple religion.
They would now be considered a homeland security threat or some such shit and locked up, put on a no fly list and given a free colonoscopy. The several thou would be proceeds of crime and fined in the brazillions or dollars....
Pretty sweet article, not so much about Jobs but more about how things were. It's always great to hear a good robin hood story of the guys who come from behind to really make it big in the world.
news that matters
titled 'Phreaking for Real' tells the story from Steve Wozniak's perspective. It starts "In 1971, the day before I headed off to my third year of college at Berkeley, I was sitting at my mother's kitchen table and there happened to be a copy of Esquire sitting there." After giving an account of the article and the excitement it gave him, Woz first mentions Jobs four pages later: "One of the first things I did after reading the article was to call up my friend Steve Jobs. He was just about to start twelfth grade at Homestead High School, the same high school I'd gone to. I started telling him about this amazing article, [...]".
Be a criminal first. Then start a business so you can rip people off bigtime. Legally.
Don't much care for apple of the last 10+ years. Apple could have advanced computing greatly. Instead they advanced lockin, lawsuits, form over function, and trendy fad expensive disposable products.
We're not a pc! No.. you're the same hardware with one extra thing to make it a pain to interoperate with the rest of the computing world easily and cheaply. Once apple started using intel as their base it should have become obvious to everyone what they were doing and what they actually cared about. Money.
And that does not make you great. That's actually pretty common.
Damm shame... Apple forcing microsoft and other companies to compete on a level open playfield could have done so much more to advance technology.
Instead you now get your choice of iproduct in a range of primary colors!
What's that? Is that a symlink for cp?
> this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.
this [visit] inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building [a GUI] themselves, an effort that made them several [millions] dollars.
Now that is a pattern of real innovation.
lucm, indeed.
Wait.... Steve Jobs is Doctor Who now???
It's amazing how fucked up humanity is.
Day after day, "media" spends time talking about someone who managed to run some businesses that basically produced some eye-candy that naive people can drool over. A hero.
But chance that you will hear about someone who actually saves peoples' eyes (like this, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduk_Ruit) are almost zero.
Edward Bernays would be proud.
. . . greetings, John Draper! This article made you my hero. Hope you've had a great life since the 1970s.
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I wonder what inspired him to deny paternity of his kid for years and steal steve wozniaks atari profits.
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Nowadays Apple is very protective of anything they consider their own property.
Ave! duci novo, similis duci seneci
Once the effort is tainted with illegality, it is forever doomed.
A great example for our children, Steve-O.
We can't have current owners of Apple products find out that Jobs was once at least tagging along with someone who liked to hack. It would tarnish his image.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Am I the only person on here who, despite making a living in IT, has has never owned a single Apple product in my entire life, doesn't want to own one, and probably will never own one (not out of some deep political motive but just because they don't sell things I want to buy)?
I'm much more interested in some tech news, which the "Steve Jobs dying" thing was FOR ONE DAY, and could be summarised in a single brief article. I don't need it front-page of a London paper, slapped across BBC News and then people dredging up any-old-article (not even a particularly interesting one) in order to use the "news" (now "olds") to seem relevant.
I hope we get the same amount of fuss when the creator of the Mario characters dies, or someone similar. Actually, I hope we get the amount of fuss *suitable* for when anyone like that dies, instead - i.e. one-day, one-article, done.
Need any more be said. Apple has become the epitome of everything that is founders once opposed - a greedy parasitic, controlling, corporate monstrosity, run by lawyers and accountants (and even more lawyers). Its founders were corrupted by power and greed, which brought out the worst in them.
people prefer "olds".
I own just one Apple product, a first gen Mac Mini. A real heap of crap. I can't even be bothered getting some puttyknives to crack open the case to install more RAM and a bigger hard disk. Its just sitting at the back of a cupboard, mocking me every time I open the door for some more printer paper.
Mind you, I've sti;ll got the box and all the bits of associated paper. It may become a collectors item and I'll get my money back!
It was spread all over the BBC because BBC News is infested with the cult of Jobs. As well as the solid reporting on the death, this weeks "Click!" has an extended hagiographical appreciation of Steve Jobs, a man I have always regarded as cross between a typical salesman and an intellectual magpie, always on the look out for Ohh! Shiny!
Have yu seen the BBC Breakfast team all drag out iPads whenever they can?
I think the BBC is taking product placement cash...
herve leger is really eye-catching additionally to the sexy style.
The irony here is rich and creamy. Jobs and iTunes made the bluebox-like act of downloading music for 'free' an act of unspeakable violence, at least if you ask the lawyers of the RIAA or Apple. So, where will the next Jobs get the thrills needed to motivate them to greatness? Probably where we expect it the least.
Organization? You must be joking..
It's obvious that without Ron Rosenbaum there would have been no Steve Jobs.
It's just too bad Ron Rosenbaum had been an anonymous nobody for forty years. Who knows how many more Steve Jobs we would have had if his inspirational masterpiece had been in wide circulation.
How this country treats its inspirational journalists is nothing short of scandalous.
Seriously, that reprinted Esquire article is an amazing document. I can't believe it's 40 years old!
To the person complaining about relevence, if you don't care about it, ignore it! Maybe consider investing the time you spent typing negative comments in reading something you are interested in instead? Much more rewarding I promise :-) besides, Know Your History! I'd seriously be amazed at anyone I know that's a committed hacker (old defn) not to be fascinated by that article.
Anyway, my actual reason for posting - Given the age of hte article, does anyone know of a recent follow up to it? I'd love to know what the main characters have been spending the rest of their working lives doing and what the "blind kids" found to pique their interest in the modern world!
[idge.net] every daY...Like
The thing you have to remember is that Wozniak loved technology, and loved to learn how things worked. It's no surprise that he would want to build a blue box and explore the telephone system.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was an opportunist. He didn't care about how it worked. He cared that people wanted to make illegal phone calls. So he convinced Wozniak that they should sell the things, something which Woz would have never decided to do on his own. That's a move which almost got them both arrested on one occasion, and nearly shot by a criminal wanting their boxes on another. And I certainly remember how Woz phrased the arrest scenario, where when the cop showed up while they were using the box on a pay phone, Jobs shoved it on Woz so that he wouldn't be caught with it. What a real weasel.
Inspiration is a funny thing. It might take two people in a similar direction, but that doesn't mean they have the same motives.
I actually own a copy of the article, the esquire has a naked woman on a sing on te cover, couldn't help but jump at the chance t own a bit of phreakng history.
I wonder if it's worth more now, I know I paid a premium for it last year.
Would it be legal for me to scan and post it somewhere for interested parties to read?