Steve Jobs Interview about the Blue Box Story | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs Interview about the Blue Box Story

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67 pointswave28 comments

I had forgotten that telephony was in his blood prior to the Apple II. It even surfaced momentarily at NeXT with ISDNKit. Not knowing about this history, it would be easy to think it odd, in 2007, that Apple brought a phone to market. Today it seems natural.

Interestingly, the greatest modem ever was an Apple II product and could be used as (among other things) a bluebox:

http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/Machines/cat/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT

And yet he goes ballistic when people "blue box" the iPhone by jailbreaking it. I know, it's not the same, jailbreaking is legal.

...he goes ballistic...

Is this hyperbole or is there a Ballmeresque chair-throwing incident I don't know about?

I can hardly recall Jobs saying anything about jailbreaking at all. Would be interesting to hear more about the case of him going ballistic over the issue.

Jobs would probably think in the lines of:

"If you're not willing to break the law, you're not passionate enough"

Brings a whole new meaning to "good artists copy, great artists steal".

It really feels like the world finally caught up to Steve Jobs rather than the other way around. Its a wonder how early he has been using the word 'magical' and obsessed with creating the best version of anything out there even with a hacky product like a blue box.

they even included a guarantee with each one they sold. quoted in Return to Little Kingdom:

"The demonstrations provoked curiosity and Jobs and Wozniak made cassette tapes of tones that friends would need to call their favorite long-distance numbers. Jobs arranged a supply of about $40 worth of parts and Wozniak took about four hours to wire a box which was then sold for about $150. To cut down on time it took to build boxes the pair decided to stop wiring the boxes by hand and to have a printed circuit board made. Instead of spending four hours wiring a box, Wozniak could now finish a box within an hour. He also added another feature that turned one button into an automatic dialer. A small speaker and battery were attached to the printed circuit board, a keypad glued to the lid, and when all was finished, a card bearing a message in purple felt pen was taped to the bottom. It read "He's got the whole world in his hand" and it was linked to an informal guarantee. Wozniak promised that if a faulty box was returned and still contained the card he would repair it free of charge."

Underpromise and overdeliver.

Someone needs to make an iphone app called "Blue Box" that let's you make free phone calls and submit it to the store.

Then email Steve Jobs and ask him why they denied it when without the same concept, there would have been no Apple.

They have. It's called Skype. (Or Google Voice; take your choice.) And fittingly, they even have icons which are (approximately) blue boxes.

Not to land lines or other cellphones without the client?

And I thought Apple denied the google talk app for calling other phones?

The Google Voice app never purported to be a VoIP solution. It's simply a UI to the Google Voice API. When you attempt to make an actual call with it, it sends you off to the built-in dialer with a "predialed" phone number. The calls you send and receive via Google Voice use your cellular talk plan and not the data plan (which VoIP would do.)

tl;dr- GV is not a VoIP service; it's a call management service

Talkatone still exists to this day allowing for Google Talk functionality up to, and including, Google Voice calls over 3G.

Talkatone does exactly that. Free phone calls to regular phone numbers in US and Canada. You can even make calls while you are traveling abroad. SMS will be added soon.

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt

No one here wants to discuss Eleanor Roosevelt with you.

I honestly don't care. That's not why I posted this.

That wasn't lost on me. Neither was the fact that you were neither discussing an event nor an idea. You posted it to have a go at everyone participating in this thread.

Edit: "Be the change you want to see in the world." — Mahatma Gandhi

Not true. I posted it because it built upon what Steve said.

"...and experiences like that taught us the power of ideas..."

That's what inspired my original comment. I respect Steve and Woz like founding fathers of the Computer Age. No offense taken pohl, semantics throw all of us off.

I am the change I want to see in the world. I don't bring other people down on HN or try to question why they posted something. I have no right.

I'm glad to hear that, and I'm sorry for misinterpreting you. I wasn't able to connect your quotation with the video.

Am I the only person seing the iPhone UI on that Blue box?

It's really cool to see someone so successful talk like a hacker.

Jobs in his "neo-Amish" style phase!

"We figured out", "we built". Something tells me Woz did those things, SJ.

Didn't, like, everyone do this back in the day?

"Didn't, like, everyone do this back in the day?"

I don't know about everyone, but back when things were a lot more electro-mechanical and the laws far less Draconian it was much easier for the techno-curious to hack around with stuff. Used to be able to do switch-hook dialing from ATM phones, for example. Very amusing.

Side comment: A friend of mine told me today that he recently fixed his dormant Philips DVD player when he learned it was a matter of replacing a capacitor. I told him it sounds like an Onion headline; "Area man repairs own DVD player."

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