Exploding the Phone

April 1, 2013

Tech industry veteran Lapsley uses more than 100 interviews and 400 Freedom of Information Act requests to present the virtually unknown battle between phone companies and overcurious young tech whizzes determined to explore Ma Bell's networks. With accuracy and integrity, he pieces together a believably authentic re-creation of 1967, a highly significant period in telecommunications history. The author's background in electrical engineering and management well qualifies him to contextualize the "phone phreak" movement. While he also devotes attention to the interests of the corporation and the government, he clearly intends his readers' sympathies to lie with those who merely wanted to know everything about how phones worked, and justly so: their efforts led to the first "online" social networks (the telephonic equivalents of cyberspace), and, according to its founders, Apple. This differentiates Lapsley's book from existing related histories of the telephone, telephone companies, the computer, and computer hacking, and from articles on phone phreaks proper. VERDICT Particularly resonant to members of any counterculture, this fascinating narrative captures the ethos of hacking as it existed before the personal-computer era.--Ricardo Laskaris, York Univ. Lib., Toronto

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 22, 2012
In 1967, an enterprising young Harvard student, Jake Locke (the names in this book have been changed), stumbled upon an intriguing ad in the Harvard Crimson; curiosity piqued, Jake soon discovered, with the help of the phone company’s own materials and a few other interested people, that he could rig a “blue box” that would allow him to subvert the phone system and make free phone calls. Drawing on exclusive interviews with former “phone phreaks,” FBI agents, former Ma Bell employees, as well as on extensive research on telephone systems and declassified government documents, technology writer Lapsley smartly chronicles the adventures of many of these individuals, including two youngsters named Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, whose construction of a blue box set them on the road to developing future culture-changing technologies. For example, Lapsley tells the story of David Condon, who created a device that would mimic phone tones in order to fool the system into bypassing the operator for long-distance calls, and Ralph Barclay, whose quick study of the November 1960 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal allowed him to manipulate the phone system to his advantage to make free calls. In a perhaps too grandiose, though momentarily provocative, conclusion, Lapsley points out that the “phone phreaks taught us that there is a societal benefit to tolerating, perhaps even nurturing the crazy ones... for if Wozniak and Jobs had gone to jail for making blue boxes, we might never have had Apple.”

December 1, 2012
Sporting a foreword by Steve Wozniak (who, before he founded Apple computers, was a phone phreak himself) and the kind of detailed history that will appeal to the book's target audience, this isn't just a story about the early phreaksthe term that combines phone and freak and is used to describe the people who figured out how to fool the telephone system into allowing them to make free long-distance calls. It's also the story of a giant phone company so desperate to maintain its monopoly that it resorted to outrageously illegal practices and of the war between the FBI and the phreaks, who claimed ripping off the phone company was a form of political protest. Like Ammon Shea in The Phone Book (2010), Lapsley uses his main subject as a jumping-off point for a highly engaging history of the telephone itself and plenty of intrigue. Sure, these guys, these phreaks, were breaking the law, but they were also innovators, technological geniuses, precursors of today's computer hackers. A fascinating book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2013
A rollicking history of the telephone system and the hackers who exploited its flaws. Before the mid-20th century, long-distance phone calls were the domain of the now-extinct telephone operator. Beginning in the 1950s, AT&T introduced new equipment that allowed customers to place long-distance calls directly. These new switching machines communicated by sending tones back and forth at a specific pitch: 2,600 Hz, "or seventh octave E for the musically inclined." In 1955, David Condon happened to stumble upon a Davy Crockett whistle at his local Woolworth's which made just such a tone. Although the term would not be coined until years later, when Condon trilled his Crockett whistle into the handset, he became the first phone phreak--"someone obsessed with understanding, exploring, and playing with the telephone network." In his debut, technology consultant Lapsley lays out an incredible clandestine history of these first hackers, who not only tricked the phone system into letting them make calls for free, but would show others how to do the same. They eventually built small devices called "blue boxes" so anyone with one of these boxes could cheat the phone company. Lapsley deftly escorts readers through the development of the modern telephone system (and how it was exploited), covering intricate details of phone technology with prose that is both attentive to detail yet easy to understand for general readers. Perhaps more importantly, the author weaves together a brilliant tapestry of richly detailed stories--the people and events he describes virtually come to life on the page. Taken as a whole, the book becomes nothing short of a love letter to the phone phreaks who "saw joy and opportunity in the otherwise mundane." A first-rate chronicle of an unexamined subculture.

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