Annotation Tuesday! Ron Rosenbaum and “The Secrets of the Little Blue Box” see note please
The person Craig S. Karpel mentioned in this interesting history is a dear friend for decades …..who would have thunk that his interest led to “Apple” even though he has been the apple of my eyes for years…..rsk
The writer talks about his eerily prescient 1971 Esquire classic about “phone phreaks,” and how it inspired Steve Jobs (who later said, “If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”)http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tuesday-ron-rosenbaum-and-the-secrets-of-the-little-blue-box/
Some writers work for decades before one of their pieces gets widespread attention. Ron Rosenbaum managed to pull it off with his second long-form magazine article.
Rosenbaum’s 1971 Esquire piece, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” tells the story of an underground network of telephone hackers – dubbed “phone phreaks” – who devised a small box that enabled them to control the long-distance phone network. Rosenbaum’s article quickly became a cult classic and made overnight celebrities of the phone phreaks, especially a character named Captain Crunch, who made the phone network dance to his tune by blowing a toy whistle given away in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal.
It touched a nerve maybe because it combines old-fashioned underground sci-fi intrigue vs. the tech surveillance state. And everybody likes the band of little guys taking on the Big Money Goliath using brains instead of tanks.
Rosenbaum’s article is the rare magazine story that not only chronicled history, it also shaped it. A tech enthusiast named Steve Wozniak read Rosenbaum’s piece, and then showed it to his friend Steve Jobs. Before long, the two collaborated on building and selling their own blue boxes. It was the first product release of what would eventually become one of the world’s most valuable companies – Apple.
The piece also would turn out to be remarkably prescient, revealing how some of the phone hackers were already turning their attention to an even more tempting target – computer networks.
With the apparent Russian hack of the U.S. presidential election dominating headlines worldwide, it seemed a perfect time to revisit this 46-year-old gem, which helped launch a career that has included the publication of several books, including “Explaining Hitler,” “The Shakespeare Wars,” “How the End Begins” and a collection of his longform essays and reporting, “The Secret Parts of Fortune,” with nonfiction from The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Slate and The New York Observer, among others.
I chatted with Rosenbaum about “The Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” which wasrecently republished as part of the Amazon Singles Classics series. His answers have been slightly edited.
What was the genesis of this piece?
It came from Esquire. Just for context, this was during the last couple years of the editorship of the late Harold Hayes, part Marine sergeant, part avant, avant gardiste. A great editor on all levels who, more than anyone of the other claimants, deserves credit as a founder of what we now think of as “The New Journalism.” There was no such name or aesthetic doctrine written down when I was there, just a lot of writers given freedom to tell their stories in sometimes unconventional ways. But it was still at its heart about intensive reporting, immersive storytelling, not stylistic tricks. Read Terry Southern’s knockout hilarious evocation of the place in the short story called “Blood of a Wig.” I advise every journalist to read it. It’s in one of his collections, “Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes.”
The Blue Box piece was only my second magazine story. I had been writing for the Village Voice for a year and a half after the prospect of a snoozy academic career drove me out of the study of English lit at Yale graduate school, where they were grinding literature into theory. I thought journalism offered adventure and excitement to a kid from a relatively sheltered background. I wanted to hang out with cops and criminals. I stumbled into a couple of lucky breaks – right place at the right time – and got to do it.
Anyway, I went out to San Francisco and Metzger (very colorful, now dead) and Gilbertson gave me an overview of the phone phreak realm on Metzger’s Sausalito houseboat, I think. They also gave me a list of the nation’s most prominent phone phreaks. Many had gotten in touch with Gilbertson after his bust hit the papers. (They were not very security conscious, mainly lonely at the time). I started going down the list, talking to them on the phone via the Bering Strait or some exotic “loop-around” they would usually insist on, with each contact getting more and more of a Looking Glass feeling the more I entered into their world.
Did you immediately think it was a great story, or did the subject grow on you as you reported it?
Both. It got better than I could have imagined.
Did the phone phreaks like the story or dispute it in any way? Did your reporting cause them any problems, legal or otherwise?
As far as I can gather, some were conflicted. Most liked the publicity, the David and Goliath narrative viz a viz AT&T. They were like underground resistance heroes, intelligence being their super power. Some feared/suffered from a crackdown. Up until then, the Feds and the phone company were not especially eager to let people know how vulnerable long-distance communications were, so there was no high-publicity bust. I only recently found out that an internal phone company memo vouched for the accuracy of the story, and estimated $50 million a year in losses from phreaking.
Were you surprised to see what kind of impact your story later had on the emerging computer culture, including Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs? Did Wozniak really think at first that your piece was a work of fiction?
Yes, that’s funny. I only learned about the Apple connection when I happened to have lunch with Jobs while doing a piece on his ad guru Jay Chiat (who did the Apple “1984” ad). Jobs told me that Woz’s mother sent Woz the Esquire piece, and Woz couldn’t believe it could be real. (The piece had been fact-checked and lawyered to the max.) He thought it was fiction, and even said so in the first edition of his memoir until I convinced him to change that in later editions.
They were like underground resistance heroes, intelligence being their super power.
Anyway, Woz showed it to his pal Jobs and they got all excited and found the missing phone code combinations – the ones that I’d deliberately left out of the story — in an engineering journal, which allowed them to build a first-gen Blue Box of their own. It was the beginning of the Apple partnership, even though as far as I can tell they weren’t very good at it then. And then they met the master of it all, Captain Crunch, and it all went viral in a subdued underground way.
Crunch is a different story in terms of response. The story made him an underground star, a Great American Gyro Gearloose character. While I was doing the reporting, he’d find ways of breaking into the conversations I’d have with other phone phreaks to assert his primacy and detail his many achievements and then claim unconvincingly that he “never did it anymore.” But he’d call me illicitly from the Sierra Mountains from remote phone booths to which he’d hooked up his celebrated “unit.”
At first, after the story came out, he reveled in being a star, an idiosyncratic role model for the new wave of hackers emerging from phone phreakdom. I recall a celebratory meeting with him and the journalist Maureen Orth at a McDonald’s in San Jose. (Maureen did a story that came out a few weeks after mine.) And he was thrilled to be in the orbit of Jobs and Wozniak, who it seems learned a lot from him; he worked on the early Apple and Microsoft products. It was a two-way street. Jobs has been quoted saying, “If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”
But apparently, Captain Crunch couldn’t stop himself from phreaking, and not long after Maureen’s story came out, he got hauled in by the Feds and afterward (baselessly) tried to blame me. I think we have a fragile friendship now, but I think he likes to use me as an excuse. I should say for the record that I’ve never spoken to the Feds or any authority about his identity, which I only learned long after the piece came out.
Why did this story resonate with so many people and why has it stood the test of time? Do people still come up to you wanting to talk about it?
I still get pretty frequent requests to do documentaries/interviews. It touched a nerve maybe because it combines old-fashioned underground sci-fi intrigue vs. the tech surveillance state. And everybody likes the band of little guys taking on the Big Money Goliath using brains instead of tanks.
My questions are in red, his responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button.
The Secrets of the Little Blue Box
By Ron Rosenbaum
Esquire
October 1971
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