 My my phone freaking days and just kind of very briefly cover it I didn't hear I didn't understand the German part. So I might I might repeat something in English. So basically This is a captain crunch whistle and if you glue the third hole and blow it like this That's 2600 Hertz tone and that tone is used by the American Telephone system as a hang-up signal to hang up the phone on a trunk level Very basically two levels of the phone system There's the subscriber level which is the phone you get in your home and you pick up your phone You get a dial tone and you can dial a number and it goes through But there's also a trunk level access to the phone number which controls the trunks between the different cities and each city Has their own routing codes and you can put these routing codes together And you could make your calls jump all over the place And this came this came very very handy for certain antics that I did. I'll talk about that later It all started with the Esquire article That's when it actually became public knowledge of the existence of phone freaks. Basically It came out in 1977 and the article was the secrets of a little blue box Written by Ron Rosenbaum But Ron Rosenbaum was contacted by one of these people who are building and making blue boxes for the mafia or for bookmaking Purposes and was using the blue box incorrectly Instead of dialing an 800 number they would dial a local information number or just an information number But when you call an information operator The distant operator when she answers a phone it doesn't go off hook. It means it's on hook Which means that it didn't really answer so you're not really built for the call 800 numbers it didn't matter. They were free anyway and because of this These off hook signals were being detected by the phone company and very quickly. They were busted phone freaks got a hold of this person and Chastised them for doing such stupid things like this and once I read that article I was I was going to San Jose City College I was just finished finishing up with my chemistry class and Went to my car and kind of chill a little bit and went across the street and picked up the article I read it cover to cover and I missed a couple glasses as a result, but I couldn't put that article down I said to myself after that article was done. I says oh my god that ends phone freaking as we know it today and from that point on I completely got rid of all my hardware and Made sure that I didn't have anything like that kicking around the house anymore. It was it was that bad I knew that my days were numbered the only thing that was really protecting me was the knowledge of my phone number and I was then interviewed on KPFA and Steve Weissniak caught the interview as well as saw the Esquire article on the coffee table of this house He showed it to Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs says let's make and sell them and so was Didn't know the frequencies he didn't suspect that the frequencies given in the Esquire article were correct But he happened to know how to get a hold of the bell system technical journal at Stanford library and Right there before their very eyes were all the frequencies that he ever needed to know to make and use a blue box But the only thing is he didn't know how to use it So he contacted me through KPFA and I was a little bit paranoid at first but I decided to go over there and and visit him in the dorm and he had his blue box set up and connected the phone line and He asked me how to use it. I Said I listened to the tones of the blue box and it sounded horrible. He was using square wave Frequencies instead of sine waves now the phone system back then is analog when you put a square wave into an analog circuit You tend to make a little bit of noise extra noise is can be detected by the phone company At which time I strictly warned was I says, please don't use this thing on a regular basis You will be busted you decided to sell them anyway and with the money that he used to sell the blue boxes He made enough money to print out 25 PC boards for the Apple one which he was selling at the bite shop in Palo Alto and After I showed him how to use it and warn him about the flaw in the box He says can I call somebody? And I says who do you want to call? He says well, I want to call the Pope. I said, okay Let's see. That's the Vatican right? That's in Rome. Okay. Let me get Rome information And let's get the number of the Vatican so after many many tries because his blue box was flawed It took quite a quite a few tries to get the blue box to actually persuade it to work But if he held the mouthpiece Against the mouthpiece of the phone Held it at just the right distance It would put enough quality of the tones in there where the phone company would actually accept the call We managed to get the Vatican on the phone But the Pope was not available even though it was four o'clock on the morning He basically wanted to tell the person that he wanted to confess because he was Henry Kissinger But then again, that's how what was does he likes to play jokes one time his car broke down and goes to a pay phone and Job says let's see if this blue box works So he tries to make a blue box call on a pay phone I warned him I says never try to make it from a pay phone because operator will tell when you do it And the operator could come on the line when he bangs out the number but just about the time he pulls out the box the cop pulls up and Asking him about some whether they seen somebody walked by or something and and the cops said what's that and they're pointing to the blue box because he kind of hit he kind of very blatantly hit hit it behind his back and He said oh, that's my synthesizer. It says I built this for my classes at Berkeley and Caught handed it back to him and said a guy better name a move beat it to it Muga that makes music synthesizers by the way many many years have passed since that time and I've been always been in touch with was and Every time every now and then I'll go over to his house and he lived in Sunnyvale at the time And he's got these little white mice and he he loves them because he likes the way they wiggle or whiskers But he's allergic to mice. He's always got sick and Has a cold and stuff like that, but he still likes to do this At the time there was a company called Cartra vision which went out of business and Steve bought all of the existing Cartra vision video player video recorders these big old hairy-hanging cartridges We're twice as big as the biggest VHS you can ever find and he they only can record about 30 minutes of video And he bought a whole bunch of these machines and he fixed them up and he uses them for whatever and so At that time I was working for call computer which uses a BTI system 2000. It's really just nothing more than an HP 2000 running the BTI system version of basic and I had a part-time job there basically taking the library and Taking all of the electronic programs that I could find an IEEE journal and typing them in to the library of the computer So that I could make these programs available to electrical engineers because that's what I was at the time was wanted to build a TV terminal in other words at this little device it was the UART and it would have 40 characters on a line and and he wanted to make this for call computer and He got it to work But due to some disagreements with the owner of call computer. They never it never south of light of day It's kind of sad But with 40 characters on a line. It really wasn't that not useful anyway And it had a UART a little TV transmitter called a modulator Which was used to tune the channel 3 and then you could watch it on your TV set your your text 40 columns and Then used call computer to cross assemble the 6502 And that exact code is in the original The original Apple to manual called the red book. How many have you heard of the red book? Aha, we have a few old timers around here. It's good The Apple to okay. Well the Apple to is a far better design than the Apple one it comes with 40 4k or 48k models and There it Initially came with a motherboard a keyboard a modulator for the TD RF interface that in itself is a Different story Steve really argued and wanted the modulator to be in the Apple to and but instead of having it be a separate modulator But there's one problem the FCC federal Communications Commission they control all TV emissions and everything has to be type approved a type approved process For this device would have taken several years so what they did was they just simply bought these modulators off the shelf and Included them in every single Apple to it was sold as well as a Panasonic Monorail cassette recorder, which seemed to be the best recorder to use to basically record Your your your program and play it back and load it back in the machine again And he used a very clever algorithm to do that and I still this very day He told me explain it to me one time how he did it. I'd still don't understand it. This guy's way beyond me eventually Jobs had a had a an outsource company make the molded case for the Apple to which had the keyboard embedded inside and and a place to put To connect your dad like to jacks for the connecting in your your Panasonic recorder and the floppy disks eventually came out about eight to ten months later And again Steve Wozniak was a cutting edge in the floppy disks He used the same algorithm that he used for recording on the Panasonic cassette recorder We're also recording very high density on on the standard In a I mean the standard Floppy's hundred forty characters on the floppy and you could just flip the floppy upside down You can actually use two sides of the floppy which was kind of cool a lot of computers will not let you actually do that Okay, let's see all during the time between the Apple one and the Apple two I was serving time at Lompak federal prison and I had a four-month stint there Which really actually turned out to be three and a half months and during that time I bought a radio from the commissary and I modified the radio to Took a few turns off the local oscillator of the radio so that I could listen to the 152 megahertz Walkie-talkies that the guards used so I was tapping the guards into the walkie-talkie And I also built a little jammer circuit along with it so that when you pressed a button it put a tone over that frequency You can jam their walkie-talkies. I didn't tell anybody about that part of it but it came very useful when when there was some incident happening and we and They were basically two different halves of the prison There was a building and be building and if the guards are over doing a count on a building and there was nobody over in Bebuilding and when they came over we we got their walkie-talkie information So we knew when they were coming which was kind of nice actually and So my particular job at the prison was I was working in the Piggory a pig farm I used to work at a farm a long time ago and I knew a little bit about farming techniques and how to handle animals and What I did was I marked on the pig the name of the judge that sentenced me They did not like that very well After I got out of Lompoc federal prison I went back up to the Bay Area and Got a hold of Steve and he offered me a part-time job at Apple to Design and build the telephone interface board affectionately called the Charlie board it deployed a 256 sine wave table which we generated using call computer and We had basically two pointers skipping along the table generating two tones So a pointer would go from here to here to here It would skip every 10 or 15 frequencies or every 10 or 15 sine Values to make the two frequencies so only one sine wave table It could then be used to make two tones and all you had to do is just know how far to skip it ahead To get the exact frequencies that we wanted and we could get it to within at least half a percent accuracy Which was pretty good considering it was only 256 sine wave table It just so happened that the frequencies kind of worked out that way at first pass use an 8-bit ADC and DAC ADC stands for and if you don't know already analog digital converter and DAC is digital to analog converter So it had 16 control ports for relays Was deemed the ADC too expensive proposed using a six-bit DAC and Getting the other two bits from the address line So what we did was we had a six-bit DAC and we took two bits from the address line And we used those two bits from the address line to basically put the To put into the DAC and it worked quite well actually Amazing the only thing is you had to have about two to three hundred lines of extra code and Steve's idea was well Code is free parts aren't so okay I didn't disagree with him the capabilities of the phone line was amazing. It had a programmable phase lock loop which you program in the frequency and That frequency if heard will then trigger one of the 16 ports So if I want to listen for 700 Hertz tone I would program in a binary value that would program the The programmable phase lock loop to listen for 700 Hertz tone and when it finds it it triggers one of the 16 bit ports So in the 16 bit port I would just simply peak that memory address And if it's positive tones there if it's negative the tones not there and so we used it to detect tones We we in order to detect two tones using a single phase lock loop We'd first listen for the first tone and then we reprogram it very quickly to listen for the second tone In both of those two were true and we knew that we got the tone for the two frequencies And we actually were able to get a little trial And we're actually able to make a hundred and ten bod modem out of it But the problem was is just how fast it took for those phase lock loops to actually trigger and Switch on and that was our biggest kind of what one of our biggest problems But we got around it by using some pretty clever techniques The touch tones busy's even voice messages as long as these messages were Very consistent. We can tell the difference between we're sorry your call cannot be completed as dialed or the number You dialed is not a working number So those two are actually can be detected with a phase lock loop and the differences can actually be Be reasonably accurate. I'd say 80 to 90 percent accuracy But we were also able to generate dial tones reading tones busy tones and all of the other Required tones using this sign table in the thing uses for the phone board answering machines at the time there were no voicemail back then and Answering machines cost it around $400 But a person can just use a regular standard Panasonic tape recorder for recording the messages and controlling the recorder using those ports On the phone board the phone board just had some relays connected to it Now you do this is plug a cassette recorder into one of the relays and we just switch on and off the recorder to play the Outgoing message or record the incoming message remote appliance control We were using two of the 16 ports giving giving us 14 ports that we can play around with 14 lights or 14 appliances that we can both listen to and Detect the state of that appliance as well as control that appliance We did this by having it beep a series of beep tones. So if the light is switched on Every tone would go five lights go beep beep beep beep beep. Okay. Oh then that that light is turned on We need to turn it off So you'd send a tone a code if the phone board would detect it and say okay switch the light off So this could be useful for like the smart home, but back then smart homes were science fiction You know, they didn't exist War dialing this is what I used it for You give it an exchange code and it finds all the computer access codes All the computer access numbers of watch lines maps all valid 800 numbers in an exchange And that was how I found the CIA crisis hotline to the White House And we all know we all know the story about how I accessed the CIA crisis hotline number by tapping into the line And by listening to who it was that that would bring up president Nixon and We found his code name as Olympus a couple weeks later. We called up but before that I had to find out what where that 800 number went and When we first called that number the person who answered the phone was really rude and Why would somebody be rude when an 800 number is paid for by that party? To receive a call well, I Had to do a little social engineering and I called a guy back up a couple weeks later and I says this is That told him this is a phone company in White Plains, New York And we're having a translation problem into this number which number have we reached sir and they gave us the number I said you've reached this number. This is a CIA crisis hotline number in the White House Thank you, sir. We'll fix it right away and well hung up It's all I needed to know and at that point I found the For every 800 number there is an equivalent 7-digit number Using 6-digit translation because a 4a switch long distance which does 6-digit translation, which means that it'll translate 80424 into 202456 leaving the last number 9337 that was the actual number by the way to be the the number for those for the White House's CIA crisis hotline and So that was how we got the crisis hotline and we knew that president Nixon's code name was was Olympus a week or so later I go to a phone freak gathering and everybody likes to trade codes and stuff like that, so This guy I wanted this watts line this guy had this amazing AT&T conference bridge you can conference up to 10 conversations together It directly converted the touch tone, which is different frequencies than the blue box tones, which are called multi frequencies So they were using two tones the multi frequency tones were used to switch between cities at the trunk level access The touch tones were used for subscriber phones for touch tone dialing like we're using them today Okay, so Well, I told the guy well. Well, here's a number. Why don't you I'll give you this number In return he says what's that number? I says this is a number of the this is a CIA crisis hotline to the White House And if you want to talk to president Nixon you just ask for Olympus. He says I don't believe it Oh, really the White House try it. So I said but before you do I want an exit strategy So I get the hell out of there as quick as I can I insisted that they stacked a few tandems to get to avoid being traced Sure enough. We asked for Nixon sure enough his voice came on and the guy was just being a dork And he says sir, we have a crisis on our hands sir. We're out of toilet paper And so I guess that was the first instance of being able to prank or punk the president and so Other than word dialing of course on modem is also other uses for the phone board as well and Why wasn't it marketed well rules and regulations of course always come into play Especially relating to directly connecting to the phone line It was illegal and actually against not only the phone company laws But against actual state and federal laws to connect anything to the phone line Not even so much as a speaker and so and they can usually tell because the phone company measures Resistance to these lines all the time and if you do do something funny like hook up an illegal extension to your phone they'll know about it almost immediately and So Steve Jobs also got excessive pressure from my Bell and legal threats for Marketing that phone board Of course the FCC had to have their little hands and it also had to be type approved So the legal concerns on how it can be used Was a little bit iffy and of course the biggest thing where we're the phone board could have evil thoughts You could make it to us and Not only touch tones, which was what it was intended for but you can also put the blue box tones in there And that no and therefore the Charlie board could have evil thoughts as the judge liked to say it when I went to court And it was too powerful for its own good It was just too many things it could do is so versatile that that it was kind of scary and Apple kind of backed out of the deal and The only other legal way to actually connect this device up to the phone company would be using an interface device Had a rental of about a hundred dollars a month and it didn't even work DC haze of course came out a couple years later with their DC haze modem and somehow they got around the legal restriction But I guess money talks and bullshit walks. What can I say? Two kinds of the phone board existed. There was a 12 12 chip version This was my own design with the 8-better ADC and DAC 16 ports 256 by sign table Only only existed in a wire wrap version of it and it was like the prototype of the prototype Later on I had a design session with Steve Wozniak at his favorite restaurant the Bob's big boy That restaurant we cut a hole in this and a fence Behind the 7 lemon store, so you didn't have to walk all the way around and he'll print little little Notes on the menus of Bob's big boy and little tablets of Alka cells were saying for your convenience So we'd meet at the Bob's big boy and we'd have little napkin session parties And he'd kind of give me some ideas about how to use the 8-bit ADC that Combination and using the address line instead of the data line for those are two extra bits that we needed and So then we designed the PC board and we made about 10 prototypes and In 1978 I was brought back to Apple to make and test 10 more prototypes about a year and a half later and An attempt to find the original documentation is being made with little to no little to no success. However This person who wrote a book called exploding the phone by Phil Lapsley actually has And as part of the supplementary information the ATT's analysis of the phone board because you see I Had moved to Pennsylvania at the time and I had a I was gonna have a Coming-home party an open house party and invited all my East Coast phone freak friends to come over Somehow they got access to my computer when I was out not in the woods Entertaining some people and I there was helicopters flying around or stuff I said so when were all this stuff's about finally two troopers come up to me and identified themselves and I says And I identified myself. He said we got him You know, I was immediately arrested read my rights led back to the house by that time There's maybe 10 or 15 people are already in handcuff tall laying inside the house there and it was just because some friends got a hold of my software and use my software for Doing something they weren't supposed to do that attracted attention to why I got busted and so it was during that time that AT&T then took the phone board and Bell Labs was in New Jersey at the time and they took an analyze the phone board and they documented it 10,000 times better than I could do it the reverse engineered it. They did everything So I have that document actually get the document from from the book Going on I served my time in Pennsylvania and I taught everybody how to do it from my own survival and During that time I come went back to California and I ran across Bill Bragg stale from the fourth industry interest group booth who had just completed Metacompiling fourth for the Apple fourth version 1.6. I was going to buy Bill's Metacompilers so I can be able to compile a An image myself, but he wanted too much money for it So I had to use his his version, but that was okay Each fourth back then had a three character plus a length for the fourth word Like the word it like the word execute would be exe and then the rest of it would be like seven or eight I'm number after that would be the the unique identifier for the for the actual fourth word later on of course support them implementation team change that To have a lot more characters So I wrote a program in fourth called easy writer now after I came back to California Of course, I had to see the judge because they revoked my probation So I had a probation revocation hearing and I met the very judge that sends me for the very first time at the request of my attorney judge Peckham and My attorney was able to talk the judge into working out a deal between Alameda County and the federal government to allow me to be incarcerated at The cost of Alameda County the federal government actually paid Alameda County for me to be in jail and It was called a work furlough program. I had to pay rent $150 a month to go to jail But I was allowed to go home and I was allowed to leave in the morning and go to a job Work and then come back to jail at night put into my skitties and my jail clothes and that was it So it turned out to be one of the most perfect situations for writing a program ever I mean when I was at the computer I was hacking away code building a meta compiler building my my source level debugger and all my other stuff that I needed to build easy writer with and then at the very end of The day I would print it out in a nice Cune printer donated by Steve Wozniak who donated The computer I mean the printer so that I can use proportional spacing not Proportional spacing between the words the proportional spacing between the letters using the Cune commands and it was the only word processors that supported direct proportional spacing and that's what really made that program fly So as I was writing easy writer in fourth the easy writer program only took up six K of RAM That's it six K of RAM and that included the fourth interpreter, which was two point three point six K of RAM and the rest of Of it that made up the six K was the actual easy writer word processor part of it and The rest was used for text We went to the fourth West Coast computer fair How ironic I ran across this guy Matthew Macintosh from the Apple Pi user group in San Francisco that had a booth at the computer fair and agreed to demonstrate easy writer at the booth Right next door to the Apple Pi booth was the fourth interscrew booth What a perfect symbionic relationship that was the people that go to our booth would say what language is it written in We just point next door the guys over at the fourth side of the booth says Well, what programs have been written in fourth? They just point to the apple pie booth We had crowds and crowds of people we couldn't copy those discs fast enough Michelle she lived about maybe three or four blocks away from the Brooks convention center this was before Moscow and he was built and She would come back and forth with boxes and boxes of discats that we would she was copying and we couldn't sell We couldn't copy them past enough with the money that we made One once I got out of my work for a program. I got an apartment and I started to work on And at that point we decided which company we wanted to go with we got offers from broader We got offers from Hayden books. We got offers from just about every conceivable software pro software vendor We decided to go with informational unlimited software because they had this really cool program called. What's wh at z it? Wow haul that wow haul that how'd all that stuff get in there and that was the name of the program It was a really stupid program But but it was and the the amount of royalties we got where we're really astounding 40% of net and I'm no 40% Gross which is amazingly high and so we went with them and they worked out quite well actually and So during that time at that fourth West Coast computer pair Steve Wozniak comes excitedly running to our booth and says come over to the Apple booth right away There's gonna be an incident Okay, fine. So I go over to the Apple booth and there's Randy Wigginton with something behind his back talking to Dave Gordon Dave Gordon was the head of the LA Apple to user group and Dave had somehow Took the monitor ROM for the Apple to e which was different than the monitor ROM for the regular Apple to and Put it into a RAM chip Inside the machine, you know kind of pirating it and Apple got really pissed off about that So Randy Wigginton thought I'd get even with him I'd taken and throwing an apple cream pie in his face at the Apple booth That's when Steve Wozniak also had this little brochure. He was handing out called but the Zaltair ZAL TA IR and what it is it was this fictitious Product that had a WOM the first to WOM ever. It was called the right only memory and He was passing him out and people were looking for the boot stuff. It was crazy But and all during that time I was still in jail They'd let me out that they'd let me out of the jail They'd let me go over to the Brooks Convention Center and after I had to come back at 6 30 so I drove back across the Bay Bridge back to Oakland where I had my my my work for a little program and and I couldn't go to any of the parties but heck at least I went to the show and then Matthew McIntosh my my business partner would then work out the deals with He'd come visit me every weekend talking about the different a royalties and we'd look at all the different contracts that he He we got from our our thing and we decided to go with information unlimited software as our as our marketing thing So by the time I got out information unlimited software was just moving from Indiana to Kensington Which is north of Berkeley had a little office space there and We started to make and manufacture the original easy writer 80 column of 40 column easy writer Now you can actually get a copy of any working copy of easy writer off of the web There's an Apple to emulator on a Windows machine that you can get that and you can also get the easy writer easy writer binary files along with the easy writer manual I did this when I was in in Sweden when I was in Stockholm We we got a an Apple to emulator and we ran easy writer on it and it worked every single feature worked perfectly Couldn't believe it So it's out there if you want to play with it. You just have to know where to get it I didn't have time enough to pull out the URLs to these places But it was because the reason why the guy is actually out of town So I didn't get the URLs, but it's there. You just have to look for it While I was writing it in jail there was a Gas crisis this was when gas started really get really climbing up. There was really rare Long lines the gas stations and stuff like that. This was in 1979 Because that's that's and then we got out I think in July 1979 an easy writer was built on fourth version 1.6 and It only had uppercase characters Because the Apple 2 did not have lower case. It only had uppercase So because of that what we did was when I wanted to capitalize a word I just hit the escape key and then the next character I type would show up as inverse video on the screen But when you printed it out It would print out as uppercase and everything else that printed in normal non inverse video would actually be converted to lower case when you print it out and Then you had a little it had another little feature called you can view what it printed out It's going to only view the first 40 columns and then the second 40 columns And So you could actually kind of get an idea what it would look like But it wasn't what you see what you get kind of a thing, you know, but I did have dot commands I did have dot L for set the left margin dot L 10 Dot R 20 dot R 50 for the right column and we had and those commands were the same commands as electric pencil because the electric pencil was the word processor to get back when you had CPM and And so That was kind of cool. So as As more and more companies started offering outside third-party vendors Bill Baker the president of I us got a hold of three major companies that offer 80 column Support for the Apple to the Vidix the M and R and one other I don't remember and they all offered us a board and detailed now how to use them So then the next thing I did was I had to build a VMI. I called it a virtual machine interface back then We call them today drivers for each of them so we and we supported character level proportional spacing and Cume and The new easywriter pro is built around fourth version 1.7 if a lot of extra features a little bit faster IBM UPM we all BM for IBM Now this was a really strange With the money that we were making from easywriter pro I took my mom and my dad and my brother on a vacation to Hawaii We went back to Hawaii bill Baker called me into his office at I us and there were these three gentlemen in suits And I said, uh-oh Are these FBI? I was freaking out Cuz I wasn't doing anything really funny even though I was on this ocean liner And I was kind of freaking around on the phone system on the boat, but I really wasn't doing anything illegal I was just kind of experimenting and so we decided to These guys handed us this piece of paper and says read and sign Okay, well basically That piece of paper was that we weren't supposed to divulge the names of the individuals that we were to meet Nor who they worked for nor any other details about the thing. They were from IBM They wanted to know how long it would take to port easywriter pro to the IBM PC IBM was planning to come out with a personal computer. This was eight months before it actually came out And so we had to figure out first of all What processor they used it took them a week to give us this information They were afraid to give us the information on the processor because I thought it was too secret of information It didn't take us long to figure out that an 8088 processor was really the same as an 8086 processor Which was a 16-bit version of the 8088 which was the 8-bit version Boy, were we lucky? We got a hold of a product that supported the 8086 OS and It was Seattle computer product DOS written by Tim Patterson and We got a TEI mainframe with eight inch floppies and we ported forth on it in about a week Thanks to the fourth interest group people Eight months prior to the IBM release. We got our PC surprise surprise Bill Gates bought the same DOS that we were using to develop forth on The IBM PC from Tim Patterson for $50,000. We couldn't believe our luck Here we had it. We had an we had the same operating system that we've been developing for maybe three or four months Right there in our hands on an IBM PC and it was the exact DOS 1.0 And so all we had to do was to port forth over We just simply took the fourth dot HEX which was generated by fourth the compiler fourth dot ASM Compiled it in the fourth dot hex and then we did bin hex fourth dot X to make it into a fourth comm file so I go upstairs to Where the IBM people were still there and I says you guys got to come down here and check this out IBM people were just turning white. Is it all wrong with our computer? I don't know. I don't think so. I gathered them around the computer and it was sitting there It's a greater than sign. It was nothing else there And I told them I says during our contract negotiations Basically, I spec'd out that it would take us about six months to port forth on the IBM PC I'm not knowing of course. I had this very lucky break And so I told them I says remember when I told you guys it would take us six months to port forth on your machine He says yeah, well guess what I lied. It's already on your machine here It is fourth thing come back and said, okay So I got forth running on the machine in 20 minutes IBM of course was in total misbelief The next thing I had to do was had to take the fourth source code Which was in fourth and compile it on to the fourth system which we already had on the IBM PC now We had a Corvus Constellation hard drive 10 megabyte with ribbon cables running into every office So we had probably four or five this was our network our network didn't have cables No TCP IP back then it was just these big giant ribbon cables They would take that hardware those hardware Corvus signals and multiplex them into Into these different Apple 2 computers that we were has we had one person working on the print subsystem We had another person working on on easy. What was it? Maybe we had easy Easy writer then we had easy data and some other kind of other programs that we were building at the same time using the same source And it was all in the Corvus So I says well gee How are we gonna get that data from the Corvus on to the IBM PC? and I says Doug hand me that parallel card a minute got the schematic of the parallel card and the parallel card Actually, it lets you can do it had a bi-directional gate there You could do both input and output, but the gate the read-write line was soldered to ground because only was an output I was a parallel output not an input thing So we lifted the pin off we cooked the NAND gate to it and then and then we lot we switched the logic around and then we we experimented around with When we hooked it up to the Corvus directly not to the constellation just for testing purposes and After diddling around with timing and things like that. We was able to read the data from the Corvus under the IBM PC memory blocks and Then we built we wrote a block, which is a fourth word for reading blocks of data from the disk and Any mitt which takes a character that you type in on the screen and we had a fully functioning disk and driver made out of a parallel card and We were able to read the source code for fourth The very next day well after we showed IBM This fourth running on the machine Paul Chasen, which was our IBM contact in Boca Raton, Florida called His people back in Boca Raton and says you guys got to come out here right away. I don't care I want you out here now. So The very next day we picked them up from the airport. We brought them over to Kensington and By the time they got there. We already had the editor working the easy writer editor was actually functioning and working We're wrapped a whole bit Because it was source it was it was fourth and fourth was so portable back then that we could do this and Of course It came up how we were able to how we were able to read the data from the Corvus Well, IBM's brought over a hardware engineer They brought over a software engineer and they brought over one or two project managers to see this thing actually work and When they found out that we modified their parallel card man the shit hit the band they were so ticked off they took away our card you said it's back three weeks and The only way we could get the fourth working on that box now is to actually use a serial card and tie up an Apple 2 Because the Apple 2 would take the fourth source from the Corvus Just send it over 9600 BOD to the to the IBM PC to load the fourth You know the fourth screen is that the compile took about twice as long Because I had to go through the serial port instead of the parallel port We were pushing releases just about every few days But eventually they blocked the final release and that was the final blow to our sales because it was only one thing We had to do was to basically get easy writer program to work on the IBM's Disk system because we wrote our own disk operating system in the easy writer Because Apple wouldn't release the details of how we can interface to their DOS It wasn't until like two or three years later that the book came out called inside Apple DOS Which finally gave us a secret so he would have could have used but that was two years too late So I wrote my own DOS took me two days to do it, but I did it it had a bitmap just like a regular DOS did and We had we had 10 24 byte blocks of data that we would use for our for our data and then whenever a Whenever a block was saved to disk we would find out the next free block and we would set that bit on and now that block was in use So we were able to and each file had its own little bitmap Where the bits were where those files were in sequential order and that was how we were able to locate the where the files were on the disk And we were pushing releases just about every few days that I did We were hitting them too fast and too hard and and their beta testing thing was just totally kind of messed up So this is pretty much the end of my talk so now I want to kind of open things up for questions and and Anything is anything is open. I mean could I talk to you about anything about Apple or anything like that back in that day? excuse me Well, so I on as I hope I understood you correct. So IBM released the PC in 1981 without a word processor So a computer museum called the Living History Museum, which was funded by Bill Gates and the rest of the people at Microsoft and It was there was a reception bill was there and the reception and I walk up the bill and I says Hey, Bill, do you know who I am? He said no This is I'm the guy that beat you to the punch and got easy writer bundled on every IBM PC So well before you got your word pro word program out because we beat them by about six months Actually before they got their word out But once their word processor came out it had a lot more functions and stuff than the needs you writer Yeah, thank you very much for your great anecdotes. I have a question more about your background Could you I read in the Wikipedia that you were working for the What was it for the air air and military For the military industry as an engineer like for the Air Force. Sorry, I'm English So can you tell us a little bit what you did in that time? Okay, I joined the US Air Force in 1964 did four years as service in the Air Force I went to Keisler Air Force Base Tech School where I learned all about systems in the Air Force Including how to protect things from atomic bombs and everything else like that and so I learned a lot about the radar systems used in the in the Alaskan do line area and These were a C and W a C in the sensor air control and warning systems And while I was up there was of course I had all the time in the world to explore the military phone system and Didn't take me long to figure out that I could use the military phone system to make calls to anywhere I wanted to go Which of course kind of made my year tour up there a little bit better. There was no television There was only one radio station and it was Armed Forces Radio Network, which had a lot of boring stuff anyway And so my duties primarily where I'd get up in the morning and Go down to the ops center where the radar systems were and open up the safe and get the PMI So these preventive maintenance instructions For that day's work that I had to do and then I would go out and to the equipment and perform these functions for testing the radar and and things like that a lot of the equipment was classified and so Then after I got out of the Air Force. I came back to California And I was very ironic too because I stopped by upstate New York on the way back and saw a poster Woodstock and I Says I heard a radio Station play a song and then they mentioned the record company And I went to the record store saw the flyer and says You're gonna come to our concert next week. I says no, I got to get back to California Boy what I made a stupid mistake there. I Missed the whole thing. I could have gone to Woodstock. I would have been so cool. So anyway on my way back in the US In California, I lived with my parents for a while in San Jose and I was driving around Palo Alto And I saw this sign saying American astrionics. I was I was a technician just out of the Air Force I still had my security clearance so I walk into this company and I said What do you guys do here? Oh, we make operational amplifiers for the military. I Says, oh really? I says I just got out of the Air Force. She says you did she says do you have a do you have a security clearance? I said, yes, I do. She said one moment, please the next day. I wound up working there It was that easy to find a job if you worked in the if you worked in the military and Had a security clearance and lived in Silicon Valley You could guarantee to get a job. It's that easy After a while, I I started getting involved with the anti-war movement a little bit and I Really didn't like the idea of building operational amplifiers using missiles to kill people So I decided to work for a national semiconductor and I worked for a Bob wild wild wilder He is one of the top Analog Circa designs for integrated circuits. He worked in the LM 101 series LM 741s These are common popular operational amplifiers today, and I worked for them for a while and I worked for Carter vision the same Carter vision and Steve Weiss me I could eventually bought all that equipment from and And just kind of moved around to various different companies. It was very easy to find work there and during that time I went to school and went to college and started getting my engineering degree and Until I ran it during that time also was when I ran into the blind kids and did all that blue box Hanky-Panky stuff that we talked about so many times that I'm not going to cover today So that was pretty much kind of like my career. So my career actually has been hardware design Analog digital both I went into software only after running into get the call computer and Because back then I had to do a lot of electronic design work And I needed a computer program to do this because to design circuits You can't just go down to your local computer store and buy a program. You had to write it yourself So that was how I learned how to write programs with just that a necessity And so I started liking software better than hardware got involved with the homebrew computer club And I think the rest is history In the in the old captain crunch cornflakes whistle way of hacking the telephone numbers or transmission It was all acoustic still the the data transmission could be Actually, yeah, so one could have an acoustic idea of what what data communication is now nowadays This is all lost because the frequencies are all too high. They are not within the audible frequency range anymore Yeah Do you think something has been lost what my glue would have called it acoustic space and now we are not in the Acoustic space anymore, or are we even more in the acoustic space? Boxes in operation by going to wide web comm slash phone trips and Go to that URL and in that URL you will find a lot of recordings made with Tandem stacking and blue boxes being made Where you get to hear the cheaps and the clunks and all the other things like that One thing I might want to mention too was Berlin I went to the CCC Congress in Hamburg a long time ago, and I wound up in Berlin and I was interested and intrigued about the German phone system, and I didn't Didn't find any indication. Maybe you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't use in-band signaling in Germany at all they they're using pretty much some other kind of signaling between cities and But I did get a chance to go over into the DDR and a hack of couple of the phone systems there and I was able to drop into a juncture using some stroger switches that they use that these were all Mechanical switches back then God knows what kind of equipment they're using but I was able to drop dump into some very interesting Interesting lines have much better much better luck in Moscow In Moscow, I actually hacked into the KGB system The way that worked was when you dial a number You can only dial zero and when you dial a zero you have ten pulses come back up when the dial returns to get those pulses What happens you do that when you dial 11 or when you dial 12 pulses? Well, we tried that out and it did some very interesting things Thank you very much. Have you had ever any? Roll models or people that you admire in your life That you look at and say, okay, they are great maybe in the past and also today people that are worth looking at First engineer I worked for at American Astronautics. His name is Harris. I looked up to him as a mentor in my electronic Information and of course Steve Wozniak When I have to mention him because we spent a lot of time together back in the days before he worked for Apple Just doing really crazy stuff pulling pranks and stuff like that I mean this guy is definitely the prankster for sure I switched to German and before we now go into the lunch break, I have a little piece of advice John Draper is here in Europe on the way because he is also doing a little charity tour, you could say he had last year really Very extensive operations in the USA that have to be financed as you may know is still Obamacare Yes, not reality And he's wearing it here free of charge, but he asked me to support him very, very much A little donation collection to ring I put a cup in front of it when you go out and put something in it We like it, but we will put this cup later on the bar Another little For the party, it will be a little cap and crunch tip So if you want to participate and with it, the contribution here a little bit to finance and also the The pleasure that still lasts, that's why Mr. Draper is sitting there Then we would be very happy to draw an online donation action that was also very fruitful, but then through a hack And through several misunderstandings So to speak fell into the water and only a broken part of the donations that were made have actually arrived at him I thank you for your attention. I thank you very much Yes Just a moment for you and we meet at 14 o'clock again here for the Provisional and the helper is in the by the 12 Apostle 9 Tisch reserviert But the last words go to John Draper Stand a little bit of that German anyway to understand what's going on so yeah, one of the things I'm doing now is I'm writing a book and We're not sure yet. Which of the Which of the systems we're gonna go with whether we're gonna go with Kickstarter certainly not quick funder Not we're not even sure about any go-go, but one of these one of these Systems that we're gonna do and The book is about halfway done now. I am working with an editor that lives in Spain earlier this summer I was here in Germany as well spent a lot of time here in Berlin and and I did some talks in Switzerland in Paris and also in In one of our clients I work at the time for a company called golden spear and they make natural language processing for search engines and I was able to Finish our particular Project on time and under budget and as a reward for that I got a $1,000 year rail pass for 21 unlimited train travel all over Europe. I certainly put that to very good use Thank you very much