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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