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.

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {demon dialer}{phreaker}]