Steve Jobs Said Without This Experience, There ‘Would Have Been No Apple’

In case you aren’t as old as me (who is), blue boxes were devices that could produce the tones used by telephones to switch long distance calls. Use a blue box, make long distance calls for free. (Calling my girlfriend when I was a freshman in college cost .45 cents a minute at a time the minimum wage was $2.65. You do the math.)

Jobs and Woz sold approximately $6,000 worth of blue boxes before they were nearly caught by police, but that wasn’t the real lesson they learned.

As Jobs tells the story:

It was the magic of the fact that two teenagers could build this box for $100 worth of parts and control hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure in the entire telephone network in the whole world, [all] from Los Altos and Cupertino, California.

Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas: the power of understanding that if you could build this box, you could control telephone infrastructure around the world. That’s a powerful thing. 

If we wouldn’t have made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple, because we wouldn’t have had the confidence that we could build something and make it work, because it took us six months of discovery to figure out how to build this…