A charming yarn is told by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in his brilliant book iWoz.
In their pre-Apple days, Wozniak and Jobs were in the business of flogging little boxes, designed by Wozniak, which allowed you to make a telephone call anywhere in the world, for nothing.
The boxes, which they dubbed 'Blue Boxes', were very popular among Californian students. So they use to drive around to student areas to sell the boxes.
During one such peddling outinng, Jobs' car lost all lights and power on Highway 17. This attracted the cops. And the cops found a Blue Box and asked what it was.
'I said it was an electronic music synthesizer', recalls Wozniak, 'I pushed a couple of buttons to demonstrate the tones.'
'The cop then asked what the orange button was for (It was actually the button which sounded the nice pure 2,600 Hz tone to seize a phone line)', remembers Wozniak, 'Steve told the cop that the orange button was for "calibration".'
The cops put Jobs and Wozniak in the back of the police car and they feared the worst.
After a while on the police car's communications system checking out Jobs' car, one of the cops handed back the Blue Box with the comment: "A guy named Moog just beat you to it". The Moog synthesizer had just been launched.
Massive relief all round. 'I wanted to laugh out loud', recalls Wozniak, 'we had bamboozled the police: bamboozled up the yazoo!'
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