
The Woz calls the Pope - jacquesm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98977379
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DarrenMills
I was a little sad to find out Jobs hung up after requesting 4000 cups of
coffee. It would have been far better to actually see if a little Starbucks
could pull that off. Or if they would just turn it down altogether.

~~~
randallsquared
There is no way they could pull that off on that notice, from a Starbucks
location. If nothing else, 3500 of them would be cold.

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taitems
Realistically, 4000 of them would be cold.

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randallsquared
Well, I was assuming nigh perfect logistics. :)

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ellyagg
I'm baffled. Doesn't the top of the article say that Wozniak is known for
pulling practical jokes like ordering 4000 cups of coffee from Starbucks? And
then the end of the article shows Steve Jobs doing that? What am I missing?

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jacquesm
Whoever wrote the caption mixed up the Steves I guess.

Great story though, especially how the bishop 'owns' Steve Wozniak by buying
time to do a little checking.

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zandorg
All I ever dialed from my Commodore 64 (the SID chip generated bluebox tones)
in 1993 was the They Might Be Giants band dial-a-song, which played a new tune
every day. (718 397 6962).

Also, Captain Crunch (John Draper) made a $1 million in about 1982 from
selling Easy Writer, a word processor, to some big company. Something I've
been trying to do for ages!

~~~
blackguardx
Are you sure these weren't just DTMF tones?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency>

By 1993, they had closed the loophole that allowed audio signals to direct the
phone switching network. With your Commodore 64, you were probably playing
DTMF tones, which control touch-tone dialing.

With a blue box, rather than dialing a phone number, Woz was actually changing
the way his call was routed. He was controlling the switching network itself,
routing his call manually across the globe. With DTMF, you are just dialing a
phone number the same way you do with your finger.

~~~
jacquesm
It could be, but that is not the whole story. Plenty of countries were 'late'
in wising up to this and took a lot longer to adapt to out of band signalling.

So, depending on the age of the network you're on there is some chance that
even today you could use tricks like these.

1993 is perfectly believable to me, depending on the location of the person
making the claim.

The tone to reset a trunk was 2.6 KHz, the reason why '2600' is still a term
with notstalgia attached to it for very early hackers.

