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 es 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  was the
original and archetype. 2. n. An IBM machine, especially a large (non-PC)
one.

