Toll Free Services: Where Jobs and Wozniak Found the Inspiration to Innovate

The friendship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak shaped into a business partnership that would own and operate one of the most powerful technological companies today: Apple. But where did they first begin? What would be their campaign that would forever change landscape of Silicon Valley? Was it found during their early collegiate experience? In a sense, yes…

It was the early 70s when long distance dialing cost an arm and a leg and new advancements in the telecommunications field were on the horizon. After a budding mutual interest from reading an article of Esquire and raiding the library of Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Center , the two techno-pioneers sparked an interest in selling toll free services out of their own dorms.

The invention was the Blue Box: a device invented by Walter L. Shaw, a former AT&T employee. The Blue Box allowed callers to make untraceable and unmonitored calls all over the country. At the time, the device was used mainly by multistate mafia families and proprietors of illegal betting operations. Jobs and Wozniak, however, had no interest in the Kentucky Derby or silencing anyone. Rather, they wanted the Blue Box to become a marketable commodity—an alternative to the traditional phone plan.

Article by The Atlantic Notes:
“Steve Wozniak had been designing electrical circuits for years. Just a year earlier he had designed his own tiny computer, the ‘Cream Soda Computer,’ so named because he and a friend drank tons of cream soda while they were building it Wozniak started thinking about how to build a digital blue box, which would be made up of the chips used to build computers, not analog components such as resistors and capacitors and transistor oscillators.”
After the design finally worked out, The Wonderful Wizard of Woz still swears to this day, “I have never designed a circuit I was prouder of.” Of course the Blue Box was an illegal device, through which they had to market and sell on the Berkeley campus—even leading to several arrests of their customers—Steve Jobs and Wozniak had no idea they had invented “phone phreaking”.

Decades later, telecommunications and toll free services have evolved to now work with the circuits built off the minds of those who designed the legendary Apple I and Apple II computers. Who knows where the next Jobs and Wozniak will come from and what are they already toying with today?