Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/29/wozniak-and-jobs-1972-blue-box-up-for-auction.html
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Gotta love that even a Woz original still needs bodge wires. Makes me feel a little better about my electronics skills.
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But does it still work?
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Does it still work in that it emits tones? Probably. Might need a re-capping at worst (ETA: and it’s missing the speaker and keypad). Blue boxes are pretty simple devices electronically and can be made with all off the shelf components.
Does it work to give you free calls? Not since the mid 1980s at best. First you need a payphone, and beyond that telcos got smart to these tricks and put in countermeasures to defeat these kind of devices.
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That’s how electronics hacking was back then. Even the greats had to learn somewhere.
I’d love to see the schematics.
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I’ve read dozens of accounts of this, but never actually seen one. I’m ashamed for multiple reasons to admit that I thought it was actually blue and box-shaped.
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Looks like he glued one IC on top of another, clipped some legs and soldered jumpers and leads to the rest. The listing says it was designed to work with a tactile keyboard (rather than the membrane type used later) but that does not seem to be included.
This thing is crystal controlled, you can see the huge crystal can. So it’s going to be within spec, probably more accurate than the stuff Western Electric made, which was all LC oscillators.
It makes a set of touch-tone-like frequency pairs, but they’re different frequencies to signal the long distance switching gear on the trunk lines. I remember the frequencies were multiples of 100 Hz, with 2600 being the ‘disconnect’ tone that would make the previous call drop and let you get the trunk dial tone.
I doubt that any of that equipment is still in use anywhere.
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Here’s a copy of issue 2 of the Youth International Party Line newsletter, probably what Woz was reading when he made his design. I have some more of these, with articles by the likes of Abbie Hoffman.
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Love this! It shows the yippie’s commitment to sharing tech knowledge about how to phreak the whole system. Is any of your collection online?
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Can you play doom on it?
What about the fonts?
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder …
by Bruce Sterling tells the story of phone phreaking if anyone is interested.
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Haha reminds me of reading the magazine 2600 so long ago
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Schematics are here:
http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx0874.pdf
http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx0875.pdf
Seems to divide a 1 MHz osc by 16, then by two integers from the frequency list to make the two tones. Diode AND-OR arrays select the divisor bits based on the keypad. Pretty straightforward stuff.
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Not sure if this is related but in the late 80’s in Australia they took tone dialing off payphones so my party trick was to learn to whistle the tones so I could pick up messages off my answering machine.
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Some of my phreaker friends from back in the day would carry pocket tone dialers around for things like this, but being able to whistle a perfect DTMF tone indeed a neat trick.
The best I could ever manage was whistling tones that would trick a modem into connecting at 1200 baud.
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As far as I can remember timing wasn’t an issue just had to get the pitch and avoid the grandpa vibrato 
“and Steve Jobs”. Right.
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I’m sure Jobs sat in the corner, occasionally asking why Woz couldn’t make the circuit board prettier.
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