#Captain crunch whistle phone hacker how to#

By then, he had fallen out of favor at tech conventions because of allegations of sexual harassment over the years.

In 2018, he published an autobiography, Beyond the Little Blue Box. (He continued to hack behind bars.) In between arrests, he invented the word processor and the computer firewall and helped develop the cordless telephone. While Apple took off, Draper landed in prison on toll fraud charges.

“I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple Computer had there not been blue-boxing,” Jobs later said. They ended up selling the gadgets and splitting the profits.

#Captain crunch whistle phone hacker how to#

Wozniak and Jobs tracked down Draper and learned how to make Blue Boxes on their own. This oddball fascination captured the attention of two nerdy college dropouts, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. The trick inspired Draper to create the Blue Box, a gadget for generating a range of useful telephone hacking tones.

Simply blow the whistle into a telephone receiver and Open Sesame! Ma Bell was yours. It so happened that the whistle emitted an audio tone at 2600 hertz-the precise frequency needed to imitate a telephone operator and take over a trunk line. That’s when Draper discovered the Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun Whistle. He joined an underground world of “phone phreaks”-a strange group that used audio tones to capture telephone lines. It was a network based on audible tone signaling-like that of the Bo’sun’s Pipe.Īfter his discharge in 1968, the eccentric Draper worked various jobs around Cupertino, California, and continued hacking AT&T for fun. That old switchboard system interpreted the telephone’s specific sequence of pulses, later tones, to connect callers to other telephones on the system. He operated a pirate radio station and figured out how to tap into the local telephone switchboard so fellow airmen could call home for free. He was also a troublemaker, scheming ways to “hack” electronic communication systems. Draper was a radar technician and inveterate tinkerer. To John Draper, a twenty-one-year-old Airman First Class based at Indian Mountain Air Force Station in remote Alaska, the sound of a Bo’sun’s Pipe meant something different. Veterans were everywhere, and even little kids knew the call of a Bo’sun’s Pipe. In 1966, a bunch of big wars–World War I, World War II, Korea-was in living memory of many American citizens, and about 65,000 young men and women joined the military every month. If you’ve ever been told to “pipe down,” then you’ve been on the receiving end of what was originally a bo’sun’s order to get below decks and be quiet. Each call or “pipe” has a distinctive sound signature. Its shrill tones cut through shipboard clatter to signal important announcements and events: mail call, meal time, the arrival of a special guest. The piercing call of the Bo’sun Pipe (formally known as a “Boatswain’s Pipe”) is a sound no sailor could ever forget. It’s because people are increasingly disconnected from the military and unfamiliar with its many unique accoutrements. They’re still used in the Navy and Coast Guard. That’s not because Bo’sun’s Pipes aren’t around anymore. Few children in 2020 would have any idea what such a thing is. They called it the “Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun Whistle.” According to the legend–and even some actual fact–this was the toy that inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to launch Apple Computer Company a decade later.īut first, imagine a little kid today-with the Civilian-Military Divide being as wide as it is-recognizing and enjoying a toy Bo’sun’s Pipe (never call it a “whistle”). In 1966, as war raged in Vietnam, Quaker Oats began putting little plastic Bo’sun’s Pipes inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal.