I just posted a scan of Ron Rosenbaum's October 1971 Esquire magazine article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box". So many phone phreaks I've spoken with have told me that this was the article that sucked them in. Rosenbaum is an incredibly gifted writer and this article still shines almost 40 years later. It's hard to take one of the geekiest of hobbies :-) and make it sound cool, but Rosenbaum succeeded beyond imagination.
Text file versions of this article have been floating around the web for some time but this is an actual color scan which really gives you a feel for the magazine and the time. (Don't miss the ad on the last page of the pdf file for the "Luv Glove"!).
I have also posted an article that came out around the same time called "For Whom Ma Bell Tolls Not" by Maureen Orth (wife of the late Tim Russert) which also came out in October 1971. Orth's piece was originally in a Sunday supplement to the Los Angeles Times but it seems to have been widely syndicated.
Finally, for the techies out there, I updated the PDFs for the previously posted Breen and Weaver Bell System Technical Journal articles to have both the correct orientation as well as OCR, so they now they are searchable and display correctly. Imagine that.
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