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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.
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