ther’s help, when he was fifteen. It
was a two-tone Nash Metropolitan.
That same summer, he began smok-
ing marijuana. His father found out
and quarreled with him. Jobs said
that was the only real fight he ever
got in with his father who wanted
him to promise that he’d never use
pot again, but Jobs didn’t keep his
promise. By his senior year he was
also dabbling in LSD in fields and in
cars as well as exploring the mind-
bending effects of sleep deprivation.
This didn’t last long. Jobs started to
listen to music and read more out-
side of science and technology. He
attended an electronics class taught
by John McCollum, a former Navy pi-
lot. For one of his projects, he made
a device with a photocell that would
switch on a circuit when exposed to
light. With a few friends, he created
light shows for parties by bouncing
lasers off mirrors attached to the
speakers of his stereo system.
The Two Steves
While at McCollum’s class, Jobs
became friends with a graduate
who was the teacher’s favorite for
his wizardry in electronics. Stephen
Wozniak was five years older than
Jobs and more knowledgeable about
electronics. His father was a rocket
scientist at Lockheed. At the same
age when Jobs was puzzling over
a carbon microphone that his father
couldn’t explain, Wozniak was us-
ing transistors to build an intercom
system featuring amplifiers, relays,
lights, and buzzers that connected
the kids’ bedrooms of six houses in
the neighborhood.
Wozniak learned from his father to
dislike extreme ambition. At an Apple
product launch in 2010, forty years
after they met, Woz reflected on their
differences. “My father told me, ‘You
always want to be in the middle,’” he
said. “I didn’t want to be up with the
high-level people like Steve. My dad
was an engineer, and that’s what I
wanted to be. I was way too shy to
be a business leader like Steve.”
The Blue Box
The adventure that helped create
Apple started when Wozniak read
an article by Ron Rosenbaum in Es-
quire in September 1971. “Secrets of
the Little Blue Box” described how
hackers had found ways to make
long distance calls for free by repli-
cating the tones that routed signals
on AT&T network. He called Steve
Jobs and read parts of the article to
him. He knew that Jobs was one of
the few people who would share his
excitement.
A hero of the article was John Draper
who had discovered that the sound
emitted by a toy whistle was the
same 2600 Hertz tone used by the
phone network’s call-routing switch-
es. It could fool the system into al-
lowing a long-distance call to go
through without extra charges. The
article revealed that other tones that
served to route calls could be found
in an issue of the Bell System Tech-
nical Journal.
Steve and Wozniak got a copy of the
journal with the frequencies. They
bought the parts to make an ana-
log tone generator. Jobs had built
a frequency counter at HP Explor-
ers Club, and they used it to cali-
brate the desired tones. With a dial,
they could replicate and record the
sounds specified in the article. They
attempted to call Wozniak’s uncle
in Los Angeles to test it, but got a
wrong number. Their experiment
succeeded and Jobs came up with
the idea that the Blue Box could be
more than a hobby; they could build
and sell them.
Next issue:
•
Steve Jobs: “If it hadn’t been for
the Blue Boxes, there wouldn’t
have been an Apple.”
21
December
2013
