Steve Jobs said building illegal blue boxes to allow users to make long distance and international phone calls for free with Steve Wozniak built their confidence, taught them “the power of ideas,” and helped them believe they could influence the world. Without those bliue boxes, Apple likely never would have come into existence.
Imagine a world where Apple didn’t exist. Imagine if Steve Jobs hadn’t become Steve Jobs.
Hard to picture? It wasn’t for Jobs, who felt that without one pivotal experience, he and Steve Wozniak wouldn’t have gone on (along with their forgotten co-founder) to launch Apple.
What was that experience? Making blue boxes.
Using a blue box was like using a hacked cable box to get TV channels you don’t pay for, something I’m also old enough to remember. (And, um, to have used.)
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 learned.
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 — (and 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…
(And) we also had the sense of magic that we could influence the world. – Steve Jobs
Jobs starts at 41:58:
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MacDailyNews Take: Thank God for the blue box!
As Steve Jobs said:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
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