Quaker Cap'n Crunch ® was introduced in 1963 and has become one of the most successful pre-sweet ready-to-eat cereals ever launched. His legendary status has meant that Draper is often the focus of hacking attempts to this day.Ĭap'n Crunch is a sweetened corn and oat breakfast cereal manufactured by Quaker Oats Company.
#Cap n crunch whistle free#
The focus of his work was not attempting to obtain free phone calls, but rather to access and manipulate the computer system which lay behind the phone to place even more complex calls with each new attempt, sending calls around the world, bouncing them off satellites only to ask a passerby at Victoria station how the weather was that morning. It has been said he placed calls that went around the world three times, then rang in the phone booth next to him.)ĭraper took phreaking to another level. (When the whistle was blown into a phone, it allowed him to route calls anywhere at no cost.
His handle, another element of phreaking culture which would become common among future computer hackers, was derived from his use of a whistle found in Cap'n Crunch cereal which emitted a 2600-cycle tone. John Draper, Captain Crunch became the idol of phreakers. Ripping off the phone company became a protest for the liberation of technology.Ī.K.A. "Ma'Bell", as the phone company was referred to, was a favorite target. The icon of counter-culture, Abbie Hoffman spread the word about phreaking in his newsletter Youth International Party Line. However, the importance of the phreaking movement to the development of hacking in general is that a subculture with anti-establishment virtues soon grew around the practice. Soon a legion of young boys were passing around the new trick. He soon discovered that he could then dial (or whistle) another number, as his local office had never received the 'hang-up' notice of the 2600-cycle tone, without incurring further long-distance charges. As legend has it, a blind boy who had a gift for perfect pitch whistled a 2600-cycle tone while speaking to his grandmother on the phone and caused the line to be disconnected. The new direct-dial system was based on multi-frequency tones. The fad began when Bell switched from human operators to a computer managed phone system.
Phreaking is a term created by a play on the words freak, phone and free.
The article outlined the methods by which a small, but growing, group of individuals were outsmarting America's telephone systems in order to make free phone calls around the globe. The underground world of phreaking came to the general public's attention in a 1971 article in Esquire magazine.
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