Slate Reprints Blue-Box Article That Inspired Jobs 121
Slate has reprinted the piece that Ron Rosenbaum wrote for Esquire in 1971, explaining to the world that there was an underground movement of people hacking the phone system. (Rosenbaum is now a columnist for Slate.) According to the article's new introduction and followup piece by Rosenbaum reflecting on its impact — and to the New York Times obituary for Steve Jobs — this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.
Re:not any more (Score:4, Interesting)
Most definitely. Phreakers would be water boarded at Guantanamo today. Not only would the law have taken Steve and Woz's paltry thousands, they would have confiscated their homes, their cars, their parent's homes and cars, and the families of both would be on no-fly lists, etc ad nauseum. Gotta do away with those phreakers - they'll be the downfall of this great corporate nation!
The lesson is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Be a criminal first. Then start a business so you can rip people off bigtime. Legally.
Don't much care for apple of the last 10+ years. Apple could have advanced computing greatly. Instead they advanced lockin, lawsuits, form over function, and trendy fad expensive disposable products.
We're not a pc! No.. you're the same hardware with one extra thing to make it a pain to interoperate with the rest of the computing world easily and cheaply. Once apple started using intel as their base it should have become obvious to everyone what they were doing and what they actually cared about. Money.
And that does not make you great. That's actually pretty common.
Damm shame... Apple forcing microsoft and other companies to compete on a level open playfield could have done so much more to advance technology.
Instead you now get your choice of iproduct in a range of primary colors!
Re:Esquire, then Xerox (Score:4, Interesting)
They were invited to Xerox and bought the tech off them. Afterwards, Apple hired some of the staff. Read history (or ask Woz) and don't be a douche.
Actually the real history is that Raskin arranged the visit so that Steve Jobs would see why the technology that was in the Macintosh was important and hopefully convince Jobs to quit trying to kill the Mac.
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html [stanford.edu]