Did You Know It Started By Hacking Phones?

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Our modern society is dominated by "hackers" turned business people: think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. But the hackers who inspired those folks started out hacking phones, not computers.

Calling themselves "phone phreaks," they were a group of socially awkward but precociously bright teens in the '50s and '60s looking for amusement. At the time, the phone system was the world's most complicated computer system accessible to the public. 

One phone phreak in particular, a blind kid from Virginia named Josef Engressia, was a phone hacking pioneer. Already able to operate a rotary phone by tapping the hookswitch like a telegraph key at the age of nine, he discovered he could make free long-distance calls by whistling into the receiver at exactly 2,600 Hz. Thanks to having perfect musical pitch, he went on to exploit many other openings in the system; he could connect or disconnect calls, dial anywhere in the world, or jump to any switchboard in the phone system. All for free. He was kicked out of college for selling calls to any location in the world for a flat fee of $1. Like any good hacker, after being convicted of phone fraud, he decided to use his talents to help debug problems in Mountain Bell's telecommunications system.

Later in life, having changed his name to JoyBubbles, he ordained himself as a minister in his own Church of Eternal Childhood and collected videotapes of every episode of Mister Rogers. 

it was this childish disdain for the rules that caught the eye of Steve Wozniak when he read a 1971 article in Esquire magazine about the phone phreaks. The article inspired Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to start their first business: a physical blue box that allowed people to make free long-distance calls. It turned out to be illegal, so they went to Plan B: an easy-to-use personal computer.

 Image credit & copyright: Beyond the Little Blue Box 

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