Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs - A Biography

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.”

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.

At first the Blue Box was used for fun and pranks. The most daring of these was when they called the Vatican and Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope. “Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and ve need to talk to de pope,” Woz intoned. He was told that it was 5:30 a.m. and the pope was sleeping. When he called back, he got a bishop who was supposed to serve as the translator. But they never actually got the pope on the line. “They realized that Woz wasn’t Henry Kissinger,” Jobs recalled. “We were at a public phone booth.”

It was then that they reached an important milestone, one that would establish a pattern in their partnerships: Jobs came up with the idea that the Blue Box could be more than merely a hobby; they could build and sell them. “I got together the rest of the components, like the casing and power supply and keypads, and figured out how we could price it,” Jobs said, foreshadowing roles he would play when they founded Apple. The finished product was about the size of two decks of playing cards. The parts cost about $40, and Jobs decided they should sell it for $150.

Following the lead of other phone phreaks such as Captain Crunch, they gave themselves handles. Wozniak became “Berkeley Blue,” Jobs was “Oaf Tobark.” They took the device to college dorms and gave demonstrations by attaching it to a phone and speaker. While the potential customers watched, they would call the Ritz in London or a dial-a-joke service in Australia. “We made a hundred or so Blue Boxes and sold almost all of them,” Jobs recalled.

The fun and profits came to an end at a Sunnyvale pizza parlor. Jobs and Wozniak were about to drive to Berkeley with a Blue Box they had just finished making. Jobs needed money and was eager to sell, so he pitched the device to some guys at the next table. They were interested, so Jobs went to a phone booth and demonstrated it with a call to Chicago. The prospects said they had to go to their car for money. “So we walk over to the car, Woz and me, and I’ve got the Blue Box in my hand, and the guy gets in, reaches under the seat, and he pulls out a gun,” Jobs recounted. He had never been that close to a gun, and he was terrified. “So he’s pointing the gun right at my stomach, and he says, ‘Hand it over, brother.’ My mind raced. There was the car door here, and I thought maybe I could slam it on his legs and we could run, but there was this high probability that he would shoot me. So I slowly handed it to him, very carefully.” It was a weird sort of robbery. The guy who took the Blue Box actually gave Jobs a phone number and said he would try to pay for it if it worked. When Jobs later called the number, the guy said he couldn’t figure out how to use it. So Jobs, in his felicitous way, convinced the guy to meet him and Wozniak at a public place. But they ended up deciding not to have another encounter with the gunman, even on the off chance they could get their $150.

The partnership paved the way for what would be a bigger adventure together. “If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple,” Jobs later reflected. “I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into production.” They had created a device with a little circuit board that could control billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. “You cannot believe how much confidence that gave us.” Woz came to the same conclusion: “It was probably a bad idea selling them, but it gave us a taste of what we could do with my engineering skills and his vision.” The Blue Box adventure established a template for a partnership that would soon be born. Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks.

Chrisann Brennan

Toward the end of his senior year at Homestead, in the spring of 1972, Jobs started going out with a girl named Chrisann Brennan, who was about his age but still a junior. With her light brown hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, and fragile aura, she was very attractive. She was also enduring the breakup of her parents’ marriage, which made her vulnerable. “We worked together on an animated movie, then started going out, and she became my first real girlfriend,” Jobs recalled. As Brennan later said, “Steve was kind of crazy. That’s why I was attracted to him.”

Jobs’s craziness was of the cultivated sort. He had begun his lifelong experiments with compulsive diets, eating only fruits and vegetables, so he was as lean and tight as a whippet. He learned to stare at people without blinking, and he perfected long silences punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking. This odd mix of intensity and aloofness, combined with his shoulder-length hair and scraggly beard, gave him the aura of a crazed shaman. He oscillated between charismatic and creepy. “He shuffled around and looked half-mad,” recalled Brennan. “He had a lot of angst. It was like a big darkness around him.”

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. “It was great,” he recalled. “I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.”

That summer of 1972, after his graduation, he and Brennan moved to a cabin in the hills above Los Altos. “I’m going to go live in a cabin with Chrisann,” he announced to his parents one day. His father was furious. “No you’re not,” he said. “Over my dead body.” They had recently fought about marijuana, and once again the younger Jobs was willful. He just said good-bye and walked out.

Brennan spent a lot of her time that summer painting; she was talented, and she did a picture of a clown for Jobs that he kept on the wall. Jobs wrote poetry and played guitar. He could be brutally cold and rude to her at times, but he was also entrancing and able to impose his will. “He was an enlightened being who was cruel,” she recalled. “That’s a strange combination.”

Midway through the summer, Jobs was almost killed when his red Fiat caught fire. He was driving on Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a high school friend, Tim Brown, who looked back, saw flames coming from the engine, and casually said to Jobs, “Pull over, your car is on fire.” Jobs did. His father, despite their arguments, drove out to the hills to tow the Fiat home.

In order to find a way to make money for a new car, Jobs got Wozniak to drive him to De Anza College to look on the help-wanted bulletin board. They discovered that the Westgate Shopping Center in San Jose was seeking college students who could dress up in costumes and amuse the kids. So for $3 an hour, Jobs, Wozniak, and Brennan donned heavy full-body costumes and headgear to play Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit. Wozniak, in his earnest and sweet way, found it fun. “I said, ‘I want to do it, it’s my chance, because I love children.’ I think Steve looked at it as a lousy job, but I looked at it as a fun adventure.” Jobs did indeed find it a pain. “It was hot, the costumes were heavy, and after a while I felt like I wanted to smack some of the kids.” Patience was never one of his virtues.