He called it the "Blue Box" and renamed himself "Captain Crunch." Using his devices, phreakers were allegedly able to reach President Richard Nixon at the White House, the pope in the Vatican and even pose as the National Guard to falsely tell callers a nuclear accident had wiped out Santa Barbara.ĭraper, then 73 years old, holding a Cap'n Crunch bosun's whistle at the Maker Faire technology exposition in Berlin in 2015. Draper's engineering ability allowed him to create a device that could create all the tones necessary to not only use phone lines, but route through entire phone systems. The popularity of the toys skyrocketed, but they needed more. They'd discovered that the bosun's whistle toy that came in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal at the time could play the exact note needed to commandeer a phone line. The phreakers got through to him and asked for his assistance. One day, Draper was testing another pirate radio signal by broadcasting a number for people to call. He was discharged in 1968 and moved to Cupertino, California.īy this time, phone phreakers were in regular communication with each other, sharing information over the same phone lines they were hacking. There, he also learned how to access local switchboards to make calls for free and even started a pirate radio station. He followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Air Force himself, where he worked with electronics. John Draper was a tinkerer from a young age the son of an Air Force engineer, he was able to build radios and the like from old spare parts. While Engressia could do it by whistling on command, other "phreakers" needed technological help, but no matter how they made the sound, emitting a tone or combination of tones let them use the phones for free. If you could play the correct frequency tones, you could control the phone system. After World War II, human switchboard operators were gradually replaced with multi-frequency signaling, which used audible tones to control telephone switches. Back then, a five-minute call could cost upward of $25 (more than $220 in today's dollars), so it was a pretty good deal for everyone involved. His fellow students would pay him a dollar, and he'd whistle the tone into the phone so they could make a free long-distance call. (Apple)Įngressia would spend his college years at the University of South Florida in the late 1960s, where he put his discovery to good use to earn extra cash. Apple wasn't Jobs and Wozniak's first business together, but at least Apple was nice and legal.
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