![]() It had flush-touch panels for a keyboard, rather than these unsightly buttons sticking out. Anyway, the model I had ready for limited mass production was small enough to fit inside a flip-top Marlboro box. We had a manufacturing deal worked out in the Philippines. Before then we retailed them for $1,500 apiece, but $300,000 in one lump was hard to turn down. The deal was a thousand blue boxes for $300 apiece. They use them to place bets coast to coast, keep lines open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to pay. “We had this order for a thousand beeper boxes from a syndicate front man in Las Vegas. I wish I could show you the prototype we made for our big syndicate order.” There are lots of blue boxes around, but mine are the smallest and most sophisticated electronically. “I think it’s something to do with how small my models are. His fingers are still dancing, tapping out beeper patterns. They go a little crazy.” He looks down at the neat little package in his palm. They say hello and start thinking of what kind of call to make next. They hardly talk to the people they finally reach. I’ve watched people when they first get hold of one of these things and start using it, and discover they can make connections, set up crisscross and zigzag switching patterns back and forth across the world. But you’ll find that the free-call thing isn’t really as exciting at first as the feeling of power you get from having one of these babies in your hand. “And they can’t trace the calls? They can’t charge you?” You can call yourself from one pay phone all the way around the world to a pay phone next to you. You can call next door by way of White Plains, then over to Liverpool by cable, and then back here by satellite. And you can obscure your origins through as many levels as you like. They don’t even know anything illegal is going on. But with your beeper box, once you hop onto a trunk, say from a Holiday Inn 800 number, they don’t know where you are, or where you’re coming from, they don’t know how you slipped into their lines and popped up in that 800 number. An operator has to operate from a definite location: the phone company knows where she is and what she’s doing. You seize a tandem with this top button,” he presses the top button with his index finger and the blue box emits a high-pitched cheep, “and like that”-cheep goes the blue box again-“you control the phone company’s long-distance switching systems from your cute little Princess phone or any old pay phone. Essentially it gives you the power of a super operator. He is trying to explain to me how his little blue box does nothing less than place the entire telephone system of the world, satellites, cables and all, at the service of the blue-box operator, free of charge. He is dancing his fingers over the buttons, tapping out discordant beeping electronic jingles. I am in the expensively furnished living room of Al Gilbertson*, the creator of the “blue box.” Gilbertson is holding one of his shiny black-and-silver “blue boxes” comfortably in the palm of his hand, pointing out the thirteen little red push buttons sticking up from the console. The Blue Box Is Introduced: Its Qualities Are Remarked
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |