

Steve Jobs Interview about the Blue Box Story  - wave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI

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pohl
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.

~~~
js2
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>

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

~~~
pohl
_...he goes ballistic..._

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

~~~
rimantas
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.

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twidlit
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.

~~~
jmtame
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._ "

~~~
Bud
Underpromise and overdeliver.

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ck2
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.

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

~~~
ck2
Not to land lines or other cellphones without the client?

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

~~~
delinka
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

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

~~~
pohl
No one here wants to discuss Eleanor Roosevelt with you.

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

~~~
pohl
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_

~~~
rblion
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.

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

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

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

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wyclif
Jobs in his "neo-Amish" style phase!

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

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

~~~
jamesbritt
"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."

