We all know how popular Apple is for its quality products but do you know what made Steve jobs to start Apple? In an interview that was conducted in 1995, Jobs reveals the reason which made him launch Apple.
Steve Jobs was fascinated by the working of computers from his childhood. Steve Wozniak who had dropped out from his college also had a deep interest in computers and coding. Jobs and Wozniak became friends due to similar interests. During those days, a man who was known as Captain Crunch was famous for making free telephone calls with devices known as blue boxes.
Jobs pointed out a fatal error that AT&T had made in the original digital telephone network. AT&T had put the same tones as signals between computers in the same band which was used to transmit voice. Jobs and Wozniak found a trick to recreate those signals and this made them search for AT&T’s secret tones. To do so, they found an AT&T technical journal that had everything about these tones with accurate details.
“It’s another moment I’ll never forget. We saw this journal, and we thought, ‘My god, it’s all real.’ So we set out to build a device to make these tones.”
Jobs and Wozniak kept working on this and in a span of three weeks, they successfully built a box that was to make long distance calls for free.
With this newly created technology, Jobs and Wozniak decided to do some prank calling the Pope just to have some fun. Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger, and he managed to talk with senior cardinals in the Vatican and told them to wake up the Pope before they discovered that it was a prank.
In the interview Jobs has said:
“And you might ask, so what’s so interesting about that? What’s interesting is we were young, and what we learned was, that we could build something ourselves that could control billions of dollars worth of infrastructure in the world. That is what we learned. That us two – we didn’t know much – we could build a little thing that could control a giant thing. And that was an incredible lesson. I don’t think there would have ever been an Apple Computer if there had not been blue boxing.”
You must be wondering how making the blue boxes is related to Apple? Know this in Steve Jobs’ own words:
“Well, necessity…There were time-sharing computers available and there was a time-sharing company in Mountain View that we could get free time on, but we needed a terminal, and we couldn’t afford one…So what an Apple I was, was really an extension of this terminal putting a microprocessor on the back end…And we really built it for ourselves because we couldn’t afford to buy anything.”
Jobs and Wozniak came to know that their friends wanted some help to assemble the same computer that is now known as the Apple Computer 1.
You can watch this rare video of Steve Jobs below:
