John Draper, the legendary “phone phreaker” known as Cap’n Crunch, had surgery last week to deal with a degenerative spinal disease, and his friends are raising money on GoFundMe to help cover the medical bills.
Draper worked with others in the late 1960s to hack the AT&T phone system using a toy whistle that came from a Cap’n Crunch cereal box. The whistle emitted a tone at 2600 hertz, which happened to be the same tone AT&T used to reset its phone lines.
Draper became famous for the stunt, which conferred on him the Cap’n Crunch alias. His efforts marked the beginning of the anti-establishment culture that grew up around computer hacking. He was profiled in Esquire magazine in 1971, and that article inspired Steve Wozniak to invite Draper for a meeting. Draper showed up at Wozniak’s dorm room and taught him and his friend Steve Jobs how to build a “blue box,” or a device that would hack the network and give the owner free phone calls.
“If you entered that start tone, it worked everywhere,” he says in the video below. “It was not like a fluke in a local exchange.”
Wozniak and Jobs later went on to found Apple computer. Crunch is now in his 70s and is hospitalized in Las Vegas.
On Draper’s GoFundMe site, friends said the surgery involved the removal of one of his ribs in a complicated procedure. Draper said in a Facebook post on Sunday that he was OK after the surgery, but couldn’t write and was only able to communicate using Siri’s voice commands. The surgery will likely require four to six months of recovery and requires a lot of home care. His friends are trying to raise $15,000.
“Without this funding, he will not be able to maintain a normal life or care for himself. He will be bedridden most of the time throughout the recovery process,” the friends wrote. “The Crunchman will have limited access to his computer and if the funding is successful, he will try to arrange a way to access his computer from his bed.”
Draper also faced life-threatening surgery in 2014, and I visited him in a Las Vegas hospital room. He needed help moving from the hospital to another place. I helped him move, but he was unable to do an interview at the time.
Draper is actually on the final legs of completing a new book.
“My co-author and friend Craig Wilson ([email protected]) will be reading my wall,” Crunch wrote on Facebook.
Here’s a film of Draper talking about his exploits at an event in Krakow, Poland.
Skeeter1020 on September 27th, 2017 at 22:29 UTC »
Reading the comments, I'm pretty certain I'm the only one in here who has gone to the linked article and read it.
The guys pretty ill and running a Go Fund Me to try and aid his rehab from a complicated operation. The articles about that, the story about the Captain Crunch whistle is just mentioned in it to explain who he is.
Poor guy. I hope he pulls through.
Edit: RIP inbox! And thanks for the Gold! I've also had a PM from someone with a name suspiciously like it might be him, bit I'm going to see what I can find to verify that first.
Edit2: also, sorry that I didn't notice the article was pretty old. I just went to it, read it, and came back here and was surprised nobody in the comments was mentioning him being ill or anything.
mikeincolumbus on September 27th, 2017 at 21:36 UTC »
Jobs and Wozniak started out selling the blue boxes before Apple.
There is a fantastic book “Exploding the Phone” that tells the story of the phone phreaks and the phone company and FBI’s attempts to catch them. Also a lot of easy to read history on the phone system, really makes you appreciate the engineering that went into such an enormously complicated system.
TooShiftyForYou on September 27th, 2017 at 20:16 UTC »
A large percentage of the phone phreaks were blind. Learning of his electronic capability, they wanted him to build a multifrequency tone generator (the "blue box") to gain easier entry into the AT&T system, which was controlled by tones. The group was previously using an organ and cassette recordings of tones to get free calls, although a blind boy who had taken the moniker of Joybubbles had perfect pitch and was able to identify the exact frequencies.
The phreakers informed Draper that a toy whistle that was packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 hertz—the same frequency that was used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready and available to route a new call. This would effectively disconnect one end of the trunk, allowing the still connected side to enter an operator mode. Experimenting with this whistle inspired Draper to build blue boxes: electronic devices capable of reproducing other tones used by the phone company.
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