First of all, Bell Labs was part of AT&T, and not a phone company in any sense of the work. The actual phone companies were the operating companies (like PacBell) and AT&T Long Lines which did long distance. There were many other parts of AT&T, like Western Electric and Teletype, which weren’t phone companies either.
Second, as already mentioned, Jobs and Wozniak were small potatoes, and probably wouldn’t be mentioned if they weren’t Jobs and Wozniak. There is an excellent book on phone hacking (the name and author escape me) which said that they sold blue boxes to some celebrities.
But everyone and his uncle were making them back then. The Bell Labs Technical Journal issue with the frequencies was the most checked out volume in the MIT Engineering Library. When I did a logic lab some friends borrowed my scope to check out the one they built.
The book mentioned the reasons for AT&T’s reactions. One was that they didn’t want the vulnerability to be more widely known. And there were many other ways to hack the system. Remember, Draper used a Captain Crunch whistle.
Ca 1970, I was vaguely aware of ‘phone pheaks’, but my entire knowledge was, for 1 year, a number/letter combo for faking ATT credit card numbers.
Back then, it was impossible to instantly verify a card number in the time the operator (remember operators?) had, so they they used a kind of ‘check digit’ - if the nth digit of the number was a ‘5’, the ending letter had to be a ‘Q’ - they could check that digit against a list while placing the call.
And yes, ATT realized the vulnerability of this and changed the number/letter each year (or so I was told).
