I was hoping someone here could shed some light on this. This would apparently be the first time (according to Google) Tufte has ever talked about experimenting with blue-boxes. I have no doubt he (and whoever his Stanford roommate was) had the technical chops to do it. I just wonder how he knows his was the "first"...since blue-box experimentation seems to have spontaneously come about after hackers put 2 and 2 together...and there was no Hacker News/Slashdot/Internet to post (with a timestamp) the exploit. Perhaps the AT&T official acted as if it were the first time they encountered a blue box in the wild?
As I recall, the first to exploit this was Joybubbles; however, Tuftes may have been the first to build a blue box. The information on MF signalling was freely available in 1960 when it was published in the Bell Tech Journal so it is conceivable that there may have been others who developed this in parallel.
For those who are interested in more on Joybubbles, then there's a documentary being made about him. More info at http://www.joybubblesthemovie.com/
