blue box

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
   {phreaker}s 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.
   There were boxes of other colors as well, but the blue box was the
   original and archetype.

   2. n. An {IBM} machine, especially a large (non-PC) one.
    

Blue Box

   <operating system> The complete implementation of the {Mac OS}
   run-time environment on the more modern {Rhapsody} operating
   system.  {Blue Box} is not an {emulation} layer; at any given
   time it will be based on the same source code and ROM image as
   the current version of Mac OS and will thus incorporate future
   Mac OS improvements.

   (1997-10-15)