A most noble and liberating specimen in hand-held electronics.
It used Bell Labs own spec. for in-band signalling to emulate a telephone operator's console and provide free calls and untracability to its posessor.
It is rumoured that the sale of these devices helped to fund the fledgling Apple Computer. Also notable: Apple's first modem, the cat something-or-other, was able to combine frequencies, via its dial-string, to produce CCITT tones.
See Also: Captain Crunch, Demon Dialer

A term which refers to decent sized bins, usually a bright blue colour, that are used in recycling efforts.

These efforts are often futile, due to the fact that most people couldn't be bothered to use them, spouting off random excuses such as: "One person can't make a difference", which has been proven quite untrue.

The items are often recycled into such things as milk jugs, toilet paper (as well as many other papers), and an assortment of "environmentally friendly" items.

The Blue Box also refers to either Rhapsody or Mac OS X's compatbility environment to run legacy Mac OS apps. There are three "boxes" or APIs that run on Mac OS X: blue for classic apps, yellow is an updated OPENSTEP API, and the red box is the Carbon API. (I could be wrong about the color of the Carbon box, let me know, as it has been a while since Apple quit using those color code names).

The blue box is essentially an emulator that is tightly integrated with the OS that runs the classic Mac OS and all classic applications together, so if one crashes, in most cases, the whole blue box crashes.

Blue Book = B = Blue Glue

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 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. 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.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.