Steve Wozniak

It was really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff I worked on, Wozniak wrote, but Jobs got it right away.

By 1971, their friendship took a new turn.

Wozniak discovered an article about phone freaks, people who'd figured out how to make free phone calls by playing specific tones into the payphone.

So Wozniak and Jobs decided to test to see if the article was true.

They got in a car and headed for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which had at the time one of the greatest technical libraries in the world.

They searched for phone manuals to find the right tones.

While the article mentioned some, it didn't mention them all.

Listen to what he writes here.

This is awesome.

I was flipping around and suddenly stopped on a page.

There it was, a complete frequency list.

Sure enough, just as the article said, a 1 was composed of 700 Hz and 900 Hz tones together.

A 2 was composed of 700 Hz and 1100 Hz.

I froze.

I grabbed Steve and nearly screamed in excitement that I'd found it.

We both stared at the list, rushing with adrenaline.

We kept saying things like, oh shit, and wow, this thing is for real.

I was practically shaking with goosebumps and everything.

It was such a eureka moment.

We couldn't stop talking all the way home.