The internal joy I felt when the cop believed our story about the Blue Box being the Moog synthesizer is almost indescribable.
Not only were we not being arrested for making illegal calls with or owning a Blue Box, but these supposedly intelligent cops had totally bought our B.S. God, I wanted to laugh out loud. Our moods changed instantly.
I mean, one second we thought we were being driven off to jail, and the next we realized we had bamboozled the police. Bamboozled up the yazoo! This was such an important lesson to learn in life, and such a continuing theme for me. Some people will just believe the strangest stuff, stuff that doesn’t bear any semblance to reality.
After the cops dropped us off, we waited at the gas station until finally Captain Crunch showed up in his van. That van sure was scary to ride in as a passenger. It felt like it was going to fall over, it was so rickety. It didn’t feel solid at all. It was probably about 2 a.m. by the time we got back to Steve’s house all the way down in Los Altos. I picked up my car—I had an ochre-colored Pinto at this time—and drove it back to Berkeley.
I was tired. I shouldn’t have been on the road. Because you know what happened? Somewhere near Oakland on Highway 17, I fell asleep at the wheel. I don’t know how long my eyes were closed, but suddenly I opened my eyes and it looked to me like the guardrail was jumping onto my windshield. It looked so strange, like a dream. I grabbed the steering wheel, yanked it as hard as I could to the right, and the car just started spinning around and around.
The only thing holding me in that car was the seat belt.
As the car was spinning, I was thinking, This is it. I might die. I could really die. But then the car slid to a stop up against the center guardrail, and it turned out that only the side of the Pinto that hit the guardrail was damaged. But it totaled my car.
Losing my Pinto changed my life completely. One of the major parts of my life at Berkeley was taking groups of people down to Southern California or even as far south as Tijuana, Mexico, on weekends. Actually, my first thought after the crash wasn’t, Oh, thank god I’m alive, but Man, now I’m not going to be able to take my friends on wild adventures anymore.
The car crash was the main reason that, after this school year, my third year at Berkeley, I went back to work instead of coming back to school. I needed to earn money, not just for the fourth year of college but also for a new car.
If I hadn’t gotten in the car accident that year, I wouldn’t have quit school and I might never have started Apple. It’s weird how things happen.
But for the rest of the year at Berkeley, I kept playing with my Blue Box. Captain Crunch’s design had given me an idea: to add a single little button where I could preprogram a ten-digit number.
The number I chose to dial was this weird joke line in Los Angeles. It was called Happy Ben. When you called it, this cranky old guy—he sounded like a real old guy—would answer in this old voice like gravel: “Hey,” he’d say, “it’s me, Happy Ben.” And then he’d sing, off-key, and with no music: “Happy days are here again / happy days are here again / happy days are here again / happy days are here again.” And then, “Yep, it’s me again. It’s Ben.”
Don’t ask me why, but of all the joke lines in the world I now had free access to with my Blue Box, that one number always cheered me up and made me smile. It was just the fact that this grumpy-sounding old guy would sing that song in such a truly happy way. Somehow that style of humor made me laugh. I hope to do the same thing myself someday. Maybe I can sing the national anthem on a joke line. I still might.
Now that I had a Blue Box that could call anywhere, even internationally, I had a lot of fun calling joke lines all over the world. I’d walk up to a pay phone, dial some 800 number, seize the line with the Blue Box, push the automatic button—beep beep beep—and there he was again. Happy Ben singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It was my favorite thing.
But I hadn’t forgotten what was supposed to be the real mission of phone phreaking: not to mess up the system, but to find flaws and curious things and secrets the phone company never told anyone about. And I really did stick with the honesty thing. Even when I made my calls to friends, relatives, to people I normally would’ve called anyway, I made a point of paying for those calls. I didn’t use the Blue Box. To me, that would have been stealing, and that wasn’t what I was about.
But I did like to use the Blue Box to see how far it could get me. For instance, I would make a call to an operator and pretend I was a New York operator trying to extend the lines for phase measurements, and she would connect me to London. Then I’d talk that operator into connecting me to Tokyo. I would go around the world like this sometimes three times or more.
And by this time I got great at sounding official, or doing accents, all to fool operators around the world. I remember one very, very late night in the dorm when I decided to call the pope. Why the pope? I don’t know. Why not? So I started by using the Blue Box to call Italy Inward (country code 121), then I asked for Rome Inward, and then I got to the Vatican and in this heavy accent I announced I was Henry Kissinger calling on behalf of President Nixon. I said, “Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and ve need to talk to de pope.”
And a woman said, “It’s five-thirty here. The pope is sleeping.” She put me on hold then for a while, and then told me they were sending someone to wake him and asked if I could call back. I said yes, in an hour.
Well, an hour later I called back and she said, “Okay, we will put the bishop on, who will be the translator.” So I told him, still in that heavy accent, “Dees is Mr. Kissinger.” And he said, “Listen, I just spoke to Mr. Kissinger an hour ago.” You see, they had checked out my story and had called the real Kissinger in Moscow.
Ha! But I didn’t hang up. I said, “You can verify my number. You can call me back.” And I gave him a U.S. number that would call a loop-back number so they wouldn’t find out my number. But they never called back, which was too bad.
Years later, though, I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw an article about me where they were interviewing Captain Crunch. He said I was calling the pope to make a confession!
For ages and ages, I always told people how I was the ethical phone phreak who always paid for my own calls and was just exploring the system. And that was true. I used to get huge phone bills, even though I had my Blue Box that would’ve let me make any call for free.
But one day Steve Jobs came alone and said, “Hey, let’s sell these.” So by selling them to others we really were getting the technology out to people who were using it to call their girlfriends and the like and save money on phone calls. So looking back, I guess that, yes, I aided and abetted that crime.
We had a pretty interesting way of selling them. What we would do is Steve and I would find groups of people in various dorms at Berkeley to sell them to. I was always the ring-leader, which was really unusual for me. I was the one who did all the talking. You know, I thought I’d be so famous doing this, but it’s funny, I didn’t know you had to talk to a reporter to get your phone phreak handle (mine was Berkeley Blue) in articles.
Anyway, the way we did it was just by knocking on doors. How do you know you’re not walking up to somebody who’s going to turn you in? Someone who might see it as a crime? Well, we’d knock on a door (usually a door in a male dorm) and ask for someone nonexistent like, “Is Charlie Johnson there?” And they’d say, “Who’s Charlie Johnson?”
And I’d say, “You know, the guy that makes all the free phone calls.” If they sort of seemed cool—and you could tell by their face if they wanted to talk about such a thing as illegal free phone calls—I’d add, “You know, he has the Blue Boxes?”
Sometimes they might say, “Oh my god, I’ve heard about those things.” And if they sounded really cool enough, and every once in a while they did, then one of us pulled a Blue Box out of our pockets. They’d say something like, “Wow! Is that what they look like? Is that real?”
And that’s how we knew we had the right guy and he wouldn’t turn us in. Then one of us would say, “Tell you what, we’ll come back at 7 p.m. tonight; have everyone you know who knows someone in a foreign country here and we’ll give you a demo.”
And we’d come back at 7 p.m. We’d run a wire across their dorm room and we’d hook it up to the tape recorder. That way, everything was tape-recorded—every single sale we ever did was tape-recorded. Just to play it safe.
We made a little money selling Blue Boxes. It was enough at the time. Originally I would buy the parts to hand-build one for $80. The distributor in Mountain View where I got the chips (no electronics stores sold chips) charged a ton for small quantities. We eventually made a printed circuit board and, making ten or twenty at a time, got the cost down to maybe $40. We sold them for $150 and split the revenue.
So it was a pretty good business proposition except for one thing. Blue Boxes were illegal, and we were always worried about getting caught.
One time Steve and I had a Blue Box ready for sale. Steve needed some extra money, and he really wanted us to sell the box that day. It was a Sunday. Before driving up to Berkeley to sell the Blue Box, we stopped to eat at a Sunnyvale pizza parlor. While eating our pizza, we noticed a few guys at the next table. They looked cool, and we started talking to them. It turned out they were interested in seeing one and buying it.
We then went to a rear hallway of the pizza parlor, where there was a pay phone. Steve pulled out the Blue Box. They gave us a number in Chicago, in the 312 area code, to test it. The call went through to a ringing phone, which no one answered.
The three guys were really excited and told us they wanted the Blue Box but couldn’t afford it. Steve and I headed out to the parking lot to get into Steve’s car. And just very quickly, before Steve started the engine, one of the guys popped up next to the driver’s-side window with a big long black gun barrel pointed right at us.
He demanded the Blue Box.
Steve nervously handed it to him. And the thieves went to their own car. As we sat there, stunned, an amazing thing happened. One of the guys came back to the car and explained he didn’t have the money yet, but he did want the Blue Box. And that they would pay us eventually. And he wrote down a phone number and a name for us to call him at. His name was Charles.
After a few days, Steve called the number. Someone answered, and when we asked for Charles, he gave us the number of a pay phone. We knew it was a pay phone because back then, if the last four digits of any number started with a 9 or a 99, it was certainly a pay phone.
Steve called that number, and Charles answered. He said he would pay us eventually for the Blue Box, but he needed to know how to use it.
Steve tried to talk him into returning it to us. Charles said he wanted to meet us somewhere. We were too scared to meet him, even in a public place. I came up with the idea of telling him a method to use that would get him billed for every call—like, to start your call by dialing an 808 number, which is an area code for Hawaii. I also thought of telling him a way to use it that would get him caught. Like dialing 555 information calls, which look suspicious when they last for hours.
If only I’d been more of a joker, I would’ve thought to tell him to start by dialing the number of a police station.
But I didn’t recommend any of those things, and in the end, Steve hung up. We were too scared to do anything, and for sure Charles and those guys never learned how to use it.