The Blue Box

蓝盒子

The ultimate combination of pranks and electronics—and the escapade that helped to create Apple—was launched one Sunday afternoon when Wozniak read an article in Esquire that his mother had left for him on the kitchen table. It was September 1971, and he was about to drive off the next day to Berkeley, his third college. The story, Ron Rosenbaum’s “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” described how hackers and phone phreakers had found ways to make long-distance calls for free by replicating the tones that routed signals on the AT&T network. “Halfway through the article, I had to call my best friend, Steve Jobs, and read parts of this long article to him,” Wozniak recalled. He knew that Jobs, then beginning his senior year, was one of the few people who would share his excitement.

恶作剧与电子技术的终极结合——也是促成苹果公司成立的疯狂表演——在一个周日的下午启动了，当时沃兹尼亚克看到了母亲给他留在厨房桌子上的《君子》（Esquire）杂志上的一篇文章。当时是1971年的9月，他正准备第二天出发去伯克利，他的第三所大学。那篇文章——罗恩·罗森鲍姆（RonRosenbaum）写的《小蓝盒的秘密》——描绘了黑客和电话飞客是如何通过模拟AT&T（美国电话电报公司）网络上接通线路的特定音频免费拨打长途电话的。“这篇长文刚读到一半的时候，我就给我最好的朋友乔布斯打电话，然后读了一部分给他听。”沃兹尼亚克回忆说。他知道，那时候已经开始读高中四年级的乔布斯一定也会非常兴奋。

A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker known as Captain Crunch because he had discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the breakfast cereal was the same 2600 Hertz tone used by the phone network’s call-routing switches. It could fool the system into allowing a long-distance call to go through without extra charges. The article revealed that other tones that served to route calls could be found in an issue of the Bell System Technical Journal, which AT&T immediately began asking libraries to pull from their shelves.

文中有一个关键人物：约翰·德雷珀（JohnDraper），他是一名黑客，外号“咔嚓船长①”，这是因为，他发现早餐麦片附赠的哨子发出的声音与电话网络中用以传输呼叫的开关发出的音频是一样的，都是2600赫兹。这样就可以骗过系统，允许长途电话接通，而不产生额外的费用。文章中还提到，其他一些可以作为内部线路控制的单音频信号的信息，可以在《贝尔系统技术期刊》中找到。而AT&T公司立刻要求各地图书馆将这本期刊下架。

As soon as Jobs got the call from Wozniak that Sunday afternoon, he knew they would have to get their hands on the technical journal right away. “Woz picked me up a few minutes later, and we went to the library at SLAC [the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center] to see if we could find it,” Jobs recounted. It was Sunday and the library was closed, but they knew how to get in through a door that was rarely locked. “I remember that we were furiously digging through the stacks, and it was Woz who finally found the journal with all the frequencies. It was like, holy shit, and we opened it and there it was. We kept saying to ourselves, ‘It’s real. Holy shit, it’s real.’ It was all laid out—the tones, the frequencies.”

那个周日的下午，乔布斯接到沃兹的电话后，立刻意识到他们必须马上找到那本技术期刊。“几分钟之后沃兹就来接我，我们去了斯坦福大学线性加速器中心的图书馆，想看看能不能找到。”乔布斯回忆道。那天是周日，图书馆关门了，但他们穿过一扇很少上锁的门进到了里面。“我记得我们在书架上猛翻，最后是沃兹找到了那本期刊，上面有所有的频率。那种感觉简直就是‘天哪！’我们翻开它，所有信息都有。我们一直对自己说：‘这是真的，天哪！这是真的！’所有信息都写得清清楚楚——音调，频率。”

Wozniak went to Sunnyvale Electronics before it closed that evening and bought the parts to make an analog tone generator. Jobs had built a frequency counter when he was part of the HP Explorers Club, and they used it to calibrate the desired tones. With a dial, they could replicate and tape-record the sounds specified in the article. By midnight they were ready to test it. Unfortunately the oscillators they used were not quite stable enough to replicate the right chirps to fool the phone company. “We could see the instability using Steve’s frequency counter,” recalled Wozniak, “and we just couldn’t make it work. I had to leave for Berkeley the next morning, so we decided I would work on building a digital version once I got there.”

那天晚上，沃兹尼亚克在森尼韦尔电子商店关门之前跑了过去，买到了制造模拟声音发生器需要的零部件。乔布斯之前在惠普探索者俱乐部的时候就傲过一个频率计数器，他们用这个计数器来调校他们需要的声音。只要一拨号，他们就能复制并录下文章中指定的声音。到了午夜，他们准备好测试了。很不幸，他们使用的振荡器不够稳定，无法准确复制能够骗过系统的声音。“我们使用史蒂夫的频率计数器可以发现振荡器的不稳定性，”沃兹尼亚克说，“但就是没办法让它工作。我第二天一早就要去伯克利了，所以我们决定，等我到那儿之后，就着手制造一个数字版的蓝盒子。”

No one had ever created a digital version of a Blue Box, but Woz was made for the challenge. Using diodes and transistors from Radio Shack, and with the help of a music student in his dorm who had perfect pitch, he got it built before Thanksgiving. “I have never designed a circuit I was prouder of,” he said. “I still think it was incredible.”

从未有人做过数字版的蓝盒子，但沃兹生来就是迎接挑战的。他从电器连锁店RadioShack买来二极管和晶体管，在同宿舍一个拥有完美音准感的学生的帮助下，在感恩节之前就完成了制作。“这是我设计过的最让我自豪的电路，”他说，“直到今天我仍然觉得难以置信。”

One night Wozniak drove down from Berkeley to Jobs’s house to try it. They attempted to call Wozniak’s uncle in Los Angeles, but they got a wrong number. It didn’t matter; their device had worked. “Hi! We’re calling you for free! We’re calling you for free!” Wozniak shouted. The person on the other end was confused and annoyed. Jobs chimed in, “We’re calling from California! From California! With a Blue Box.” This probably baffled the man even more, since he was also in California.

一天晚上，沃兹尼亚克从伯克利驱车前往乔布斯家中测试蓝盒子。他们想打给沃兹在洛杉矶的叔叔，但是弄错了电话号码。不过这无关紧要，因为这套装置终于可以使用了。“嗨！我们正在免费给你打电话!我们正在免费给你打电话！”沃兹尼亚克大喊着。电话那头儿的人有点儿摸不着头脑，也有点儿不耐烦。乔布斯插话了：“我们正在加利福尼亚给你打电话！在加利福尼亚给你打电话！用一只蓝盒子给你打电话！”这番话很可能让对方更加困惑了，因为他也在加利福尼亚。