The founders of Apple, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, had a brief and highly illegal business manufacturing and selling phone hacking equipment before founding Apple Computer and 1976. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, keep reading, as this is the story of Apple’s blue box.
Designed by Steve Wozniak, the blue box was the first collaboration between Lennon & McCartney of the digital age. The couple sold between 40 (Wozniak’s estimate) and 100 (Jobs’s estimate) blue boxes at $170 each before almost getting caught by the police and closing the business.
Couple Wozniak y Steve Jobs It wasn’t a big problem, as each box took a day to build and since the cost of the components accounted for the majority of the price, the risk/benefit ratio was very unfavorable for the product: highly illegal activities usually only survive if there is a spectacular return on investment that outweighs the risk.
four years later, both created their second company together: Apple Computer, which today is worth about 1.967 trillion dollars. What is said soon?
What was the blue box of the founders of Apple used for?
It’s no wonder Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs’ blue box was innovative and the world’s first digital hacking toolsince all the devices of this type previously used by pirates were analogue.
Los phreakers (phone hackers) They used these devices to cheat the telephone systemmake free calls to anywhere in the world, in addition to many other highly illegal practices.
In a 1995 interview, Jobs said of the blue box: “We were so fascinated by them that Woz and I figured out how to build one. We built the best in the world, the world’s first digital blue box. We gave them to our friends and used them We”.
“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas. The power to understand that if you can build this box, you can control hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, that’s a powerful thing. If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there wouldn’t have been Apple existed”, explained the genius.
As the blue boxes were highly illegal and were confiscated and destroyed if found by the authorities, very few are known to remain. Hence, in 2017, a complete blue box sold at auction for $125,000.. AY, if Steve Jobs raised his head.
