A mysterious blue box marked the fate of Steve Jobs: without it “Apple would not have existed”

Steve Jobs He practically held the world in his hands until his death in 2011. His ingenuity propelled Apple’s technology to the top, but if we told you that it all started with a mysterious blue box you wouldn’t believe.

Without it, Jobs would later confess in an interview, “There would have been no Apple.”

To know the history of this blue box we must go back to 1972. Perhaps many of the young people today do not know it, but before, making a call was one of the most inconvenient things ever.

If you didn’t have a phone at home, you had to go out into the street to look for a phone. After charging the device with coins, you could make the call: if it was international, the cost was not only higher, but you even had to communicate with an operator.

Currently there is WhatsApp and other messaging networks that allow calls from your smartphone to anywhere on the planet. But before, the discomfort was enormous.

Steve Jobs, the blue box hacker

Steve Jobs and Steve Wonziak They created a blue box that allowed phone calls to be hacked. Come on, the box (Blue box, in English) existed, but they improved it and gave several to their friends.

Jobs explained it in an interview in the 1990s: “(You called) from a pay phone to White Plains, New York, take a satellite to Europe, take a cable to Turkey, go back to LA… You can go around the world 3 or 4 times, call the public phone next door and yell into your own phone. They’ll give about 30 seconds and it’ll come out on the other phone.”

All free, totally free.

But, how did it work a blue box?

produced certain characteristic tones of the telephone system to change long distance calls. When making a call, the blue box entered the operator mode to route the call as the person wanted and to where they wanted.

It was very difficult to trace, so criminals popularized them.

The power of ideas, key for Apple

“We were so fascinated by them (the blue boxes) that Woz and I figured out how to build one,” Jobs said. “We built the best in the world: the world’s first digital blue box. We would give them to our friends and use them ourselves.”

“It was the magic that two adolescents could build this box for $100 in parts and control $100 trillion worth of infrastructure across the entire telephone network worldwide.” added Steve Jobs.

This was key for Jobs and Wozniak, who founded Apple in 1976 in Los Altos, Calif.

“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas,” Jobs said. “The power to understand that if you could build this box, you could control hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, that’s a powerful thing. If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”

Every blue box that fell into the hands of the authorities was destroyed. Jobs and Wozniak were never found out, but if they were, they ended up with their bones in jail.

With the modernization of telephone systems in the world, the blue box is no longer useful. However, it would end up being highly desired by collectors: 125 thousand dollars were paid in 2017 for a blue box.