Steve Wozniak

We were so excited.

They bought the parts and went to Jobs' house, but they couldn't get it to work.

Wozniak writes, we played the tones from our tape recording, but we weren't able to get the call to go through.

Man, it was so frustrating.

No matter how hard we tried to get the frequencies right, they wavered.

I just couldn't make them accurate.

I kept trying, but I just couldn't perfect this thing.

I realized I didn't have a good enough tone generator to prove the article true or false, one way or the other.

But I was not about to give up.

Woz ends up creating a digital blue box using crystals, which are far more reliable.

He didn't get it to work right away.

That's not what happens in engineering, but he plugged away at it for months and eventually got it to work.

The part in the story that I have to mention is not only did their parents know what they were working on, they didn't try to stop them.

Woz writes, we had promised our parents we'd never do it from our home.

The blue box changed everything.

Then Jobs had an idea.

Hey, let's sell these.

So they started selling these little blue boxes for $150 each, splitting the revenue.

It was their first business together.

In 1973, Wozniak landed his dream job at Hewlett Packard designing calculators.