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At the time, you weren't allowed to hook arbitrary equipment up to the phone system -- everything had to be approved by AT&T. IIRC the hardware Woz used for his
by Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago
At the time, you weren't allowed to hook arbitrary equipment up to the phone system -- everything had to be approved by AT&T. IIRC the hardware Woz used for his dial-a-joke setup was homebrew.
- jcl 17y agoApparently it was not homebrew; here are a couple articles saying that he rented the equipment from the phone company. So the dial-a-joke thing might have been entirely legit. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html I'm guessing that when the article describes the dial-a-joke service as illegal, it's confusing it with his blue-box antics, which occurred around the same time. According to the following article (a fun read), the blue box preceded dial-a-joke; he got the inspiration for the service from a dial-a-joke line in New York that he called while demoing blue boxes to potential customers: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_microcomputing.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_mi...