The Blue Box 蓝盒子

The ultimate combination of pranks¹ and electronics—and the escapade that helped to create Apple—was launched one Sunday afternoon when Wozniak read an article in Esquire that his mother had left for him on the kitchen table. 恶作剧与电子技术的终极结合----也是促成苹果公司成立的疯狂表演---在一个周日的下午启动了，当时沃兹尼亚克看到了母亲给他留在厨房桌子上的《君子》(Esquire) 杂志上的一篇文章。

It was September 1971, and he was about to drive off the next day to Berkeley, his third college. 当时是1971年的9月，他正准备第二天出发去伯克利，他的第三所大学。

The story, Ron Rosenbaum's "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," described how hackers² and phone phreakers had found ways to make long-distance calls for free by replicating⁴ the tones that routed signals on the AT&T network. 那篇文章——罗恩·罗森鲍姆（Ron Rosenbaum)写的《小蓝盒的秘密》——描绘了黑客和电话飞客是如何通过模拟AT&T (美国电话电报公司）网络上接通线路的特定音频免费拨打长途电话的。

"Halfway⁵ through the article, I had to call my best friend, Steve Jobs, and read parts of this long article to him," Wozniak recalled. “这篇长文刚读到一半的时候，我就给我最好的朋友乔布斯打电话，然后读了一部分给他听。”沃兹尼亚克回忆说。

He knew that Jobs, then beginning his senior year, was one of the few people who would share his excitement. 他知道，那时候已经开始读高中四年级的乔布斯一定也会非常兴奋。

A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker³ known as Captain Crunch⁶ because he had discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the breakfast cereal was the same 2600 Hertz tone used by the phone network's call-routing switches. 文中有一个关键人物：约翰·德雷珀（John Draper)，他是一名黑客，外号“咔嚓船长” 这是因为，他发现早餐麦片附赠的哨子发出的声音与电话网络中用以传输呼叫的开关发出的音频是一样的，都是2600赫兹。

It could fool the system into allowing a long-distance call to go through without extra charges. 这样就可以骗过系统，允许长途电话接通，而不产生额外的费用。

The article revealed that other tones that served to route calls could be found in an issue of the Bell System Technical Journal, which AT&T immediately began asking libraries to pull from their shelves. 文章中还提到，其他一些可以作为内部线路控制的单音频信号的信息，可以在《贝尔系统技术期刊》中找到。而AT&T公司立刻要求各地图书馆将这本期刊下架。

As soon as Jobs got the call from Wozniak that Sunday afternoon, he knew they would have to get their hands on the technical journal right away. 那个周日的下午，乔布斯接到沃兹的电话后，立刻意识到他们必须马上找到那本技术期刊。

"Woz picked me up a few minutes later, and we went to the library at SLAC （the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center） to see if we could find it," Jobs recounted. “几分钟之后沃兹就来接我，我们去了斯坦福大学线性加速器中心的图书馆，想看看能不能找到。”乔布斯回忆道。

It was Sunday and the library was closed, but they knew how to get in through a door that was rarely locked. 那天是周日，图书馆关门了，但他们穿过一扇很少上锁的门进到了里面。

"I remember that we were furiously digging through the stacks, and it was Woz who finally found the journal with all the frequencies. “我记得我们在书架上猛翻，最后是沃兹找到了那本期刊，上面有所有的频率。

It was like, holy shit, and we opened it and there it was. We kept saying to ourselves, 'It's real. Holy shit, it's real.' 那种感觉简直就是‘天哪！ ’我们翻开它，所有信息都有。我们一直对自己说：‘这是真的，天哪！这是真的！ ’

It was all laid out—the tones, the frequencies." 所有信息都写得清清楚楚——音调，频率。”

Wozniak went to Sunnyvale Electronics before it closed that evening and bought the parts to make an analog⁷ tone generator⁸. 那天晚上，沃兹尼亚克在森尼韦尔电子商店关门之前跑了过去，买到了制造模拟声音发生器需要的零部件。

Jobs had built a frequency counter when he was part of the HP Explorers Club, and they used it to calibrate⁹ the desired tones. 乔布斯之前在惠普探索者俱乐部的时候就傲过一个频率计数器，他们用这个计数器来调校他们需要的声音。

With a dial, they could replicate¹⁰ and tape-record the sounds specified¹¹ in the article. By midnight they were ready to test it. 只要一拨号，他们就能复制并录下文章中指定的声音。到了午夜，他们准备好测试了。

Unfortunately the oscillators they used were not quite stable enough to replicate the right chirps¹² to fool the phone company. 很不幸，他们使用的振荡器不够稳定，无法准确复制能够骗过系统的声音。

"We could see the instability using Steve's frequency counter," recalled Wozniak, "and we just couldn't make it work. “我们使用史蒂夫的频率计数器可以发现振荡器的不稳定性，”沃兹尼亚克说，“但就是没办法让它工作。

I had to leave for Berkeley the next morning, so we decided¹³ I would work on building a digital version once I got there." 我第二天一早就要去伯克利了，所以我们决定，等我到那儿之后，就着手制造一个数字版的蓝盒子。”