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" In October 1971, Esquire published &amp;quot;Secrets of the Little Blue Box,&amp;quot;\u00A0Ron Rosenbaum&amp;#039;s electrifying story about phone phreaks, which turned into the &amp;quot;foundation event&amp;quot; for the creation of Apple Computer. Rosenbaum described the subculture of young telephone hackers whose &amp;quot;blue boxes&amp;quot; permitted them to manipulate the multifrequency tones of the international telephone system and place free calls around the world. Steve Wozniak, then a twenty-one-year-old student at Berkeley, read the story in his mother&amp;#039;s kitchen.\u00A0Contributing editor A. J. Jacobs recently talked with Wozniak about what happened next. &amp;quot;I was so grabbed by the article,&amp;quot; Wozniak says today. &amp;quot;I called Steve Jobs before I was halfway through and started reading him passages.&amp;quot; Jobs was then a sixteen-year-old high school student and a fellow tech-head. At first, they thought the story was fiction. But in a tech library they found a journal article that listed the little-known frequencies. &amp;quot;It was like, Oh my God.&amp;quot; Wozniak became obsessed. &amp;quot;I had a manual typewriter,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and I retyped the entire article, every single word, in case I lost the original.&amp;quot; He tracked down the most famous phone phreak in Rosenbaum&amp;#039;s piece, nicknamed &amp;quot;Captain Crunch&amp;quot; because he reproduced frequencies using a whistle found in Cap&amp;#039;n Crunch cereal boxes. Wozniak invited him to visit. &amp;quot;I imagined him as some suave woman&amp;#039;s guy,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;He showed up and he was much more of a geek. He smelled like he hadn&amp;#039;t taken a shower in a while.&amp;quot; Wozniak designed his own blue box that improved on the others. It was Jobs&amp;#039;s idea to make a business selling it to other students. &amp;quot;I keep my most precious memorabilia in my home office,&amp;quot; says Wozniak. &amp;quot;The Esquire article is right next to the official document when Apple went public. I&amp;#039;m looking at it right now.&amp;quot; And just a little more from Woz... Wozniak used the blue box\u00A0for prank calls, among other things. He once called the Vatican, he says, pretending to be Henry Kissinger, and almost got to the pope before a suspicious bishop called the real Henry Kissinger.\u00A0 But it also became Jobs and Wozniak&amp;#039;s first business. &amp;quot;So Steve said, &amp;#039;How much does it cost to build it?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Wozniak recalls, &amp;quot;and I said, &amp;#039;Seventy-five dollars.&amp;#039; He said we could sell it for $150. And back then that was like $1,000 or $1,500 today, and we said, &amp;#039;How could that be!&amp;#039;&amp;quot;\u00A0 They went from Berkeley dorm room to dorm room and sold their (illegal) blue boxes for $150. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d do our presentation,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;where I was the emcee talking bout all the folklore of phone phreaking. Steve was there to do the sales and money. You\u00A0read books about Steve Jobs [version] 1 and Steve Jobs 2; this was Steve Jobs 0.&amp;quot; -- For Esquire&amp;#039;s 1,000th issue, October 2015 (on sale now), we look back on the history of the magazine and launch a digital archive of everything we&amp;#039;ve ever published,\u00A0Esquire Classic. Read the full Encyclopedia of Esquire here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a38878/steve-jobs-steve-wozniak-blue-box-phone-phreaking/>