{{Title link: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_spectator/2011/10/the_article_that_inspired_steve_jobs_secrets_of_the_little_blue_.single.html }}

In 1971, Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article for Esquire about a loose confederation of proto-hackers who built devices—little blue boxes—that could crack phone networks. According the New York Times obituary of Apple founder Steve Jobs, after reading Rosenbaum’s article, Jobs and his partner in founding Apple, Steve Wozniak,…

A fascinating longread about the “phone phreaks”, a subculture that sprang up around the hacking of phone networks.

I find that reading material about mid-late 20th-century history is hard to come by: it’s recent enough that a lot of people don’t think of it as “history”, so they don’t talk about it when they talk about history, and it doesn’t really come up in much detail otherwise. Here’s a piece of that history that I thought you deserved to see.

(Hat tip to Mark E., a fellow student in my introductory computer-science course who linked to this in the course’s official forum.)

Tags:

#oh look an original post #history #recs #(sorry about it being hosted on Slate) #(but you can’t have everything)