Blue Book
= B =
Blue Glue
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. There
were boxes of
other colors as well, but the blue box was the original and
archetype. 2. n. An IBM machine, especially a large
(non-PC) one.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.