Blue Box N. 1. Obs. Once Upon A Time, Before All-digital Switches Made It Possible For The Phone Companies To Move Them Out Of Band

Blue Box N. 1. Obs. Once Upon A Time, Before All-digital Switches Made It Possible For The Phone Companies To Move Them Out Of Band

Home › Fortune Cookies › Jargon File

blue box

n. 1. obs. Once upon a time, before
all-digital switches made it possible for the phone companies to
move them out of band, one could actually hear the switching tones
used to route long-distance calls. Early phreakers built
devices called `blue boxes' that could reproduce these tones,
which could be used to commandeer portions of the phone network.
(This was not as hard as it may sound; one early phreak acquired
the sobriquet `Captain Crunch' after he proved that he could
generate switching tones with a plastic whistle pulled out of a box
of Captain Crunch cereal!) There were other colors of box with more
specialized phreaking uses; red boxes, black boxes, silver boxes,
etc. 2. n. An IBM machine, especially a large (non-PC)
one.

Related:

phreaking /freek'ing/ n. [from `phone phreak'] 1.
The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls)....
phreaking: /freek'ing/ [from `phone phreak'] n. 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls).
2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks) (see {cracking})....
box: n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box' where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, `UNIX box', `MS-DOS box', etc.
) "We preprocess the data on UNIX boxes before handing it up to the mainframe....
box n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box' where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, `Unix box', `MS-DOS box', etc.
) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing it up to the mainframe....
oy n. A computer system; always used with qualifiers.
1. `nice toy': One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately....
oy: n. A computer system; always used with qualifiers.
1. `nice toy': One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately....
idecar n. 1. Syn. slap on the side. Esp. used of add-ons for the late and unlamented IBM PCjr.
2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side of an Amiga....
bit-paired keyboard n.,obs. (alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment.
The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage....
war dialer n. A cracking tool, a program that calls a given list or range of phone numbers and records those which answer with handshake tones (and so might be entry points to computer or telecommunications systems).
Some of these programs have become quite sophisticated, and can now detect modem, fax, or PBX tones and log each one separately....