[LINK] "Blue Box" Auction

[John Mann]

Hi,

> Purchased directly from Steve Wozniak by the consignor in Autumn 1972

This seems strange to me
Looking at the chips, I see
    1820-0054  ; 7304
    9316 DC ; F 7403
    9390/7490 ; PCF 7422

The numbers on the first row are valid IC part numbers.

The numbers on the second row look like year+week date codes in 1973 and
1974
which indicate to me that the device was not sold pre-assembled in 1972.

Thanks,
    John

On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 at 12:18, Stephen Loosley <StephenLoosley at outlook.com>
wrote:

> Bonhams Auction
>
> https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/26078/lot/62/
>
> LOT 62:  STEVE WOZNIAK & STEVE JOBS.
>
> Blue Box, 1972. An original first iteration "blue box" populated circuit
> board made by Steve Wozniak and marketed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,
> 51 x 72 mm, with speaker wire and 9volt battery connector.
>
> US$ 8,000 - 12,000
> AU$ 11,000 - 17,000
>
> Bid  _________
>
> Auction ends: 5 Nov 2020, 10:00 PST  Los Angeles
>
> Blue Box, 1972. An original first iteration "blue box" populated circuit
> board made by Steve Wozniak and marketed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,
> 51 x 72 mm, with speaker wire and 9volt battery connector.
>
> Provenance: Purchased directly from Steve Wozniak by the consignor in
> Autumn 1972 during a drive together from Sunnyvale to Los Angeles.
>
> While "phone phreakers" (hobbyists who were fascinated by the phone
> system) had used a "blue box" since the 1950s to avail themselves of free
> phone service, the first digital blue box was designed by Steve Wozniak in
> 1972.
>
> It was marketed and sold by Steve Wozniak (who took the phone phreak name
> "Berkeley Blue"), Steve Jobs (known as "Oaf Tobar"), and friends in
> Berkeley and throughout California in 1972 and 1973. Wozniak cites the
> number of boxes they produced at 40 or 50, while Jobs put the number at
> 100; but certainly many of those were confiscated as phone phreaking
> arrests increased throughout 1973 to 1975, in part due to the commercial
> distribution of the devices.
>
> These blue boxes represent the first commercial collaboration between the
> two Apple computer giants, and the circuit boards the first printed boards
> by Woz. Very few of the Wozniak originals have survived and even fewer of
> these first iteration boards as Wozniak soon changed the circuit board
> layout to accommodate a less expensive membrane keypad. The early models
> would have been made by Wozniak himself.
>
> In 1971, Esquire magazine published an article titled "Secrets of the
> Little Blue Box," subtitled "A story so incredible it may even make you
> feel sorry for the phone company," about a loose band of engineers who had
> figured out how to hack Bell telephones automatic switching systems, moving
> freely through Bell's "trunk" telephone systems with the use of specific
> frequency tones generated by "blue boxes."
>
> The story of these "phone phreaks" was a sensation, and one particularly
> important reader was a young engineering student at Berkeley named Steve
> Wozniak. As Wozniak recalls, his first move after reading the piece was to
> call his good friend Steve Jobs, then still a senior in high school, and
> the next day they jumped in Woz's car and headed to the Stanford Linear
> Accelerator library to comb through the stacks searching for clues that
> would substantiate the details presented in the Esquire account.
>
> They found it, according to Wozniak: "I froze and grabbed Steve and nearly
> screamed in excitement that I'd found it. We both stared at the list,
> rushing with adrenaline. We kept saying things like 'Oh, ....!' and 'Wow,
> this thing is for real!' I was practically shaking, with goose bumps and
> everything. It was such a Eureka moment" (Wozniak, p.100).
>
> As they drove back to Berkeley they discussed the possibility of creating
> a "blue box" in a state of elation, and within three weeks Wozniak had
> devised one. Finding the frequencies produced by the analog blue box to
> vary widely, he then designed the world's first digital blue box.
>
> In his biography, he recalls, "I swear to this day—the day I'm telling you
> this and the day you're reading it—I have never designed a circuit I was
> prouder of: a set of parts that could do three jobs at once instead of two.
> I still think it was incredible" (Wozniak, p.102).
>
> Over the next few weeks, with the fortuitous assistance of "Captain
> Crunch," a blue boxer named John Draper who featured prominently in the
> Esquire article and became an instant hero to hackers and phreakers
> everywhere, Wozniak honed his design, eventually creating the world's first
> digital blue box, which was able to produce a much more consistent
> frequency than the analog contraptions that had existed previously.
>
> Now equipped with a "blue box," the two young men and their friends
> explored the phone system, including Wozniak's famous story about reaching
> the Vatican, and pretending to be Henry Kissinger calling for the Pope (who
> was unfortunately asleep at the time).
>
> Before long, Jobs came up with a plan to market these boxes to willing
> Berkeley students eager to make free phone calls. They would knock on
> random doors in the Berkeley dorms and ask for a made-up name, who of
> course was not available. They would explain they were looking for the guy
> who makes all the free phone calls, you know, with the blue box. If their
> mark expressed interest or curiosity, they would proceed to sell him a box.
>
> With Jobs' novel marketing plan and Wozniak's design, they ended up
> earning about $6000 on the project, making blue boxes for $40 in parts, and
> selling them for $150.
>
> According to Bill Claxton, who Captain Crunch notes as being in the dorm
> the first time he went to meet Woz, the earliest blue boxes used solid keys
> (this present iteration), which were quickly replaced with a soft keypad
> (as the example sold in these rooms on December 6, 2017) in order to make
> the boxes more affordable.
>
> Looking back on the entire experience, Steve Jobs would observe, "Woz and
> I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could
> solve technical problems and actually put something into production."
>
> "If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I'm
> 100% sure of that." -Steve Jobs
>
> --
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