Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell by Lapsley Phil

Author:Lapsley, Phil [Lapsley, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2013-02-04T22:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

PRANKS

LIKE THE FLAP of a butterfly’s wings causing a hurricane half a world away, the ripples of unintended consequences from Ron Rosenbaum’s “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” continued to spread. “You know how some articles just grab you from the first paragraph? Well, it was one of those articles,” Steve Wozniak recalls. “It was the most amazing article I’d ever read!”

Wozniak happened to pick up a copy of Esquire from his mother’s kitchen table the day before starting classes at Berkeley in the fall of 1971. Rosenbaum’s article “described a whole web of people who were doing this: the phone phreaks. They were anonymous technical people who went by fake names and lived all over the place,” he recalls, how they were “outsmarting phone companies and setting up networks that nobody imagined existed.” It seemed unbelievable. And yet, he says, “I kept reading it over and over, and the more I read it, the more possible and real it sounded.”

Oddly enough, part of what made the article seem so real to him were the characters. Despite their fanciful nature and funny names, Wozniak remembers, “I could tell that the characters being described were really tech people, much like me, people who liked to design things just to see what was possible, and for no other reason, really.” There was something about the whole thing that just rang true, despite how crazy it seemed. “The idea of the Blue Box just amazed me,” he says. The article even gave a few of the frequencies it used. As for Joe Engressia being able to whistle free calls? “I couldn’t believe this was possible, but there it was and, wow, it just made my imagination run wild.”

The twenty-year-old Wozniak put down the magazine. He picked up the phone and called his friend Steve Jobs—then a seventeen-year-old senior in high school—to tell him about it. Less than an hour later the duo were on their way to raid the library at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. SLAC was the atom smasher at Stanford University. It had a great technical library, Wozniak says, and he had a long history of sneaking into it to look stuff up. “If there was any place that had a phone manual that listed tone frequencies,” he says, it would be SLAC.

The two dug through the reference books and before long they struck pay dirt: an international telephone technical standard that listed the MF frequencies. “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.” Jobs agrees: “We kept saying to ourselves, ‘It’s real. Holy shit, it’s real.

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