iWoz (13 page)

Sure enough, just as the
Esquire
article said, a "1" was composed of 700 Hz and 900 Hz tones together. A "2" was composed of 700 Hz and 1,100 Hz together. A "3" was 700 Hz and 1,300 Hz.

I froze and grabbed Steve and nearly screamed in excitement that I'd found it. We both stared at the list, rushing with adrenaline. We kept saying things like, "Oh, shit!" and "Wow, this thing is for real!" I was practically shaking, with goose bumps and everything. It was such a Eureka moment. We couldn't stop talking all the way home. We were so excited. We knew we could build this thing. We now had the formula we needed! And definitely that article was for real.

That evening I went to Sunnyvale Electronics and bought some standard parts to build tone generators like the ones in the article. Immediately I found a tone generator kit and brought it back to Steve's house. Right there I soldered together two tone generators. Luckily, Steve had built a frequency counter before this, so we were able to put them together, plus a device that let you turn a dial and measure the tone it produced. For example, I could turn one dial and measure until I got the tone to approximately 700 Hz frequency. Then I could turn the other dial until it got to 900 Hz. Finally I'd play both tones at once and record the sound for about a second on a regular cassette tape recorder. Remember, those tones together meant a "1." Then I did the right combinations for the other digits. Eventually we had a seven-digit phone number and even a ten-digit number recorded.

Finally we set a tone to 2,600 Hz, which is the high E note that

supposedly seized the free line mentioned in the article. It worked!

After dialing a free 555 long-distance information number, we heard that chirp the article had talked about. Then we presumed that the phone system was waiting for tones to tell it where to connect to. But uh-oh. We played the tones from our tape recording but we weren't able to get the call to go through.

Man, it was so frustrating. No matter how hard we tried to get the frequencies right, they wavered. I just couldn't make them accurate. I kept trying, but I just couldn't perfect this thing. I realized I didn't have a good enough tone generator to prove the article true or false one way or the other.

But I was not about to give up.

• o •

The next day was my first day at Berkeley. I was involved with my classes—I thought they were great classes—but I kept thinking about the Blue Box design. I took that
Esquire
article with me and started collecting every article from Sunday papers I could find about phone phreaks. I started posting articles I found about them on my dorm room wall. I started telling my friends what these phone phreaks were all about, how intelligent they must be, and how I was sure they were starting to take over the phone system all over the country.

So there I was at Berkeley, living in my little dorm room on the first floor of Norton Hall, my best school year ever. I could mesmerize an audience of kids with tales from this article and what Steve Jobs and I had been trying to do. I started gaining a reputation as the dorm's "phone phreak," which was fitting. Because one day I explored our dorm and found an unlocked telephone wire access box for our floor. I saw enough phone wires going up to the higher floors—there were a total of eight floors of dorm rooms, including my own above the common area—and I tapped pairs of wire and connected handsets to them. The idea was to

determine for a fact which lines were the ones going to which dorm rooms. So I ended up being able to play around and find any particular phone line I wanted to.

Even though I was usually shy and went unnoticed, suddenly this phone phreaking stuff brought me out to a position of prominence in my dorm, where everyone was seeking some sort of partying and fun.

It was around this time that I discovered another kind of phone phrealc box, called a "Black Box." Instead of letting you dial free numbers, like the Blue Box did, the Black Box meant anyone who called you wouldn't be billed for the call.

I found the schematics for the Black Box in Abbie Hoffman's
Steal This Book
, an underground book I somehow managed to get at a regular bookstore. (They kept it under the counter so no one would follow the order in its title!)

That same year, an issue of
Ramparts
magazine came out with a really well-explained and completely illustrated article on how to build a Black Box with about two dollars' worth of parts from Radio Shack. All you needed were a capacitor, a resistor, and a switch or push button.

Here's how it worked: when someone called you long-distance you pushed the button to briefly tell the local phone company that you were answering. This connected the faraway line to your own. Because you didn't answer for two seconds minimum, the local phone company didn't send back a billing signal. Yet you were still connected to the caller, and the capacitor of the Black Box allowed their voice to reach your phone (and vice versa) without the phone company sensing any sort of connection. This device worked very well. In fact, one pole-vaulter in my dorm got a letter one day from his parents wondering why they hadn't been billed for two calls from Florida.

By the way, the phone company sued
Ramparts
after the article ran and drove it out of business by 1975.

• o •

So while I'm playing with Black Boxes and spreading the word about the Blue Boxes, I started to seriously go to work on my own design. Only this time I tried a digital Blue Box design, which I knew would be able to produce precise, reliable tones. Looking back, I see that it was just a radical idea to do a digital Blue Box. In fact, I never saw or heard about another digital Blue Box. Making it digital meant I could make it extremely small and it was always going to work because it was based on a crystal clock to keep it accurate. That's the same way, by the way, watch crystals keep your watch running correctly.

I already had really good design skills by this point. I mean, I'd been designing and redesigning computers on paper all the way through high school and my last two years of college. I knew so much about circuit design, probably more than anyone I knew.

And then one day I did it. I designed my own digital Blue Box.

It was great. I swear to this day—the day I'm telling you this and the day you're reading it—I have never designed a circuit I was prouder of: a set of parts that could do three jobs at once instead of two. I still think it was incredible.

You see, the circuit, which generated codes corresponding to which button you pushed, used the chips in a very unusual way.

The way all electronics works, including chips, is that some signals are sent to the electronics, to their inputs. And the resulting signals come out of the chip on connections called outputs. Now, because I was familiar with the internal circuitry of the chips, I knew that tiny signals were actually being emitted by the inputs. After those tiny signals went through my button coding circuit, I directed them to a transistor amplifier, which supplied power to turn the chips on. So you can see the amazing thing. (At least, you can see it if you're an engineer.) The chips had to supply a signal to turn them on, and they did. That signal came from one side of the battery being connected, but not the other side.

I never have been able to do anything this out-of-the-box in any of my designs in my career at Hewlett-Packard or at Apple. That's saying a lot, because my designs have always been noted for being out-of-the-box. But this was cleverer than anything.

• o •

Now, I won't say that getting a Blue Box working was just an instant thing. That's not what happens in engineering. I was in school, taking classes, and it was probably a couple of months before I did this design. But once I designed it, building it took a day.

I brought it to Steve's house, and we tried it on his phone there. It actually worked. Our first Blue Box call was to a number in Orange County, California—to a random stranger.

And Steve kept yelling, "We're calling from California! From California! With a Blue Box." He didn't realize that the 714 area code
was
California!

Instantly we got in my car and drove up from Steve's house to the dorm at Berkeley. We had promised our parents, who all knew about the project, that we would never do it from home. That one call to Orange County would be the only illegal one from either of our parents' houses.

I wanted to do the right thing. I didn't want to steal from the phone company—I wanted to do what the
Esquire
article said phone phreaks did: use their system to exploit flaws in the system. These days, phone phreaks shun those who do it to steal.

Also, I would've died to meet Captain Crunch, who was really the center of it all. Or any phone phreak; it just seemed so impossible that I'd ever meet anyone else with a Blue Box.

• o •

One day Steve Jobs called me and said that Captain Crunch had actually done an interview on the Los Gatos radio station KTAO.

I said, "Oh my god, I wonder if there's any way to get in touch

with him." Steve said he'd already left a message at the station but Captain Crunch hadn't called back.

We knew we just had to get in touch with this most famous— infamous, really—and brilliant engineering criminal in the world. After all, he was the guy we'd been obsessed with for months; he was the guy we'd been reading about and telling stories about. We left messages at KTAO but never heard back from Captain Crunch. It looked like a dead end.

But then, the most coincidental thing happened. A friend of mine from high school, David Hurd, called me and wanted to catch up. When he came up to visit, I started to tell him all these incredible Captain Crunch stories and about the Blue Box and he said, "Well, don't tell anyone, but I know who Captain Crunch is." And I looked at him, floored. How could some random friend from high school know who Captain Crunch was?

I said, "What?"

"Oh yeah," he said, "I know who he is. His real name is John Draper and he works at a radio station, KKUP in Cupertino."

The next weekend, I was sitting with Steve at his house and told him what I'd found out. Steve immediately called the station and asked the guy who answered, "Is John Draper there?" He didn't even say Captain Crunch.

But the guy said, "No, he dropped out of sight after the
Esquire
article."

Hearing that, we knew we'd found the real Captain Crunch. We left our phone number with the guy just on the off chance that Captain Crunch might call us back. And in about five minutes, Captain Crunch actually called!

We picked up the phone, and he immediately told us who he was. But he said he didn't want to say much on the phone. (I remember how, in the
Esquire
article, he had seemed pretty paranoid, sure that the phone line he was talking to the reporter on was bugged.)

Then we told him what kind of equipment we had, what we'd built. I told him it was a Blue Box that I myself had designed, and that it was digital. And he said, again, "Well, I can't talk on the phone about this, but I will come meet you in your dorm."

Man, I drove back to Berkeley just shaking the whole way. When I got there, I was telling everyone who'd listen, "Wow! Captain Crunch is coming here!" This guy I had made into a superhero—the hero of technology bandits or whatever you'd call him—the head guy, the best-known guy, was coming to my dorm room! And everybody was saying, "Can I come?"

But I said, no, no, I knew Captain Crunch wouldn't like that. So it was just my roommate, John Gott, Steve Jobs, and I who sat there in my dorm room, waiting and waiting.

Now, for some reason I was expecting this suave ladies' man to come through the door. I think it was because I'd read in the
Esquire
article that he'd tapped his girlfriend's phone line once and heard her talking to another guy, and then he called her up and said, "We're done." Just having a girlfriend, I guess, made him a ladies' man to me. I still had never even had a girlfriend.

But no. Captain Crunch comes to our door, and it turns out he's just this really weird-looking guy. Here, I thought, would be a guy who would look and act just far away and above any engineer in the world, but there he was: sloppy-looking, with his hair kind of hanging down one side. And he smelled like he hadn't taken a shower in two weeks, which turned out to be true. He was also missing a bunch of teeth. (Over the years, the joke I made up about him was that the reason he had no teeth was that he was stripping phone lines with them when the phone rang. Engineers know that the phone ringing signal is a high enough voltage to shock you really hard.)

So anyway, I saw him, and he didn't match my expectations. So I asked, "Are you Captain Crunch?" And he said, "I am he," and

he walked in just majestically. What a line that was. "I am he." And there he was.

He turned out to be this really strange, fun guy, just bubbling over with energy. And he's sitting on the bed, looking at all my phone phreak articles taped to my wall, and all the circuits and magazines, and also weird things like the twenty pounds of saltines I'd swiped from the cafeteria by stuffing a few packets in my pockets at every meal.

And he looked around and saw wires coming out of the telephones; I could tell he was surprised. I was sitting there thinking: Wow, this is the most amazing night of my life of all time, and it's just beginning!