The Secrets of the Little Blue Box: Esquire, October 1971
| AUTHOR | Ganser, L. J.; Rosenbaum, Ron |
| PUBLISHER | Audible Studios on Brilliance (09/05/2017) |
| PRODUCT TYPE | Audio (MP3 CD) |
There is an underground telephone network in this country. Al Gilbertson, creator of the "blue box," discovered it the very day news of his own arrest hit the papers. That evening his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him about the phone-phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreak who'd say nothing but, "Hang up and call this number."
Often cited as one of the greatest magazine stories ever written, Ron Rosenbaum's singular, Pynchon-esque "The Secrets of the Little Blue Box," about an underground group of hackers who built devices that could crack the telephone companies' networks, has staked its claim in the annals of history as the story that inspired the partnership of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and helped create hacker culture.
Features an afterword by the author.
"The Secrets of the Little Blue Box" was originally published in Esquire, October 1971.
There is an underground telephone network in this country. Al Gilbertson, creator of the "blue box," discovered it the very day news of his own arrest hit the papers. That evening his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him about the phone-phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreak who'd say nothing but, "Hang up and call this number."
Often cited as one of the greatest magazine stories ever written, Ron Rosenbaum's singular, Pynchon-esque "The Secrets of the Little Blue Box," about an underground group of hackers who built devices that could crack the telephone companies' networks, has staked its claim in the annals of history as the story that inspired the partnership of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and helped create hacker culture.
Features an afterword by the author.
"The Secrets of the Little Blue Box" was originally published in Esquire, October 1971.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian Thomas Powers called him "one of the few distinctive voices of modern American literary journalism." His work has been characterized by the essayist Phillip Lopate as combining "the skills of a terrific investigative reporter and an accomplished literary stylist with an idiosyncratic streak all his own."
More than ten years ago, he began investigating certain unresolved controversies among Hitler biographers, and ultimately embarked on an odyssey that took him from Vienna and Munich to London, Paris, and Jerusalem. The book that emerged combines original research and dramatic face-to-face encounters with historians, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians as they attempt to account for the elusive figure of Adolf Hitler and the meanings projected upon him by his explainers.
Currently Ron Rosenbaum writes for the New York Times Magazine, and The New York Observer, and teaches a course on literary journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of journalism.