What Does This Mean?
A device from the phone-phreaking scene that produced the audio tones the long-distance telephone network once used for call routing, which phreakers used to avoid toll charges. The term now mostly appears in hacker history.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
""The documentary spent ten minutes on the blue box and the phreakers who built them in the 1970s.""
LORE & ORIGIN
Wikipedia describes the blue box as a product of the tone-signalled long-distance network, with a 2600 Hz tone central to the early discoveries and AT&T security reportedly capturing its first one around 1962. Ron Rosenbaum's October 1971 Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" brought it to mainstream attention, and digital signalling made the devices largely useless by the late 1980s. The magazine 2600 takes its name from the tone.
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