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Steve Wozniak built his "blue box," a tone generator to make free phone calls. Wozniak sold the boxes in dormitories at the University of California-Berkeley where he studied as an undergraduate. "The early boxes had a safety feature -- a red switch inside the housing operated by a magnet taped onto the outside of the box," Wozniak remembered. "If apprehended, you removed the magnet, whereupon it would generate  off-frequency tones and be inoperable  ... and you tell the police: It's just a music box."

Woz and Captain Crunch use blue boxes in the tv movie _Pirates Of Silicon Valley_ re: the early years of Apple Computer and Microsoft

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 phreakers 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.

2. n. An IBM machine, especially a large (non-PC) one.
 - from _The New Hacker's Dictionary_ by Eric S. Raymond