I’m not sure, but I wonder if the verb to blue box, which predates Wozniak’s design, refers to the color of the Cap’n Crunch boxes that coincidentally came with a 2600 Hz whistle that reliably reproduced the tone whistlers had discovered by accident reset Bell’s long-distance trunk lines.
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It doesn’t even look complete. It looks like it’s missing the speaker and keypad. Both important components for a blue box.
This is what it should look like (this is different Woz-made blue box):
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I don’t think Jobs was at that point in his career that he was focused on aesthetics.
I remember laying out DRAM memory arrays at that time (1981). I ended up teaching a FORTH computer to drive a huge pen plotter to draw the arrays, because it was faster(?) and more consistent.
I’m not surprised that the pretty layout didn’t work; they rarely do.
(I’m laying out a board that runs up to 4 GHz for Black Hole DSP right now, it’s not easy.)
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Just to extend the idea, I have a Blue Box package on my Newton MessagePad that will generate the same tones as the hardware Blue Boxes.
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