John T. Draper, also known as Captain Crunch (after Cap'n Crunch, the mascot of a breakfast cereal), was a phone phreaker.

A blind friend of John Draper informed him that a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could be easily modified to 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.

“I don't do that. I don't do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I'm learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer.” — From Secrets of the Little Blue Box by Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire Magazine (October 1971)

This feature of the older phone call routing switches has long since been corrected by using separate circuits to transmit voice and signals, and by using more sensitive equipment, but it resulted in the Cap'n Crunch whistles becoming valued collector's items. Some hackers sometimes go by the handle “Captain Crunch” even today; as a result of this incident 2600 The Hacker Quarterly is named after this whistle frequency.

Draper was arrested on toll fraud charges in 1972 and sentenced to five years' probation. In the mid 1970s he taught his phone phreaking skills to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who later founded Apple Computer. He was briefly employed at Apple, and created a telephone interface board for the Apple II personal computer. The board was never marketed, however, partially due to Draper's arrest and conviction for wire fraud in 1977. He served his four-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc, CA, where he wrote Easywriter, the first word processor for the Apple II.

Draper later ported Easywriter to the IBM PC, beating Bill Gates on the bid for the IBM contract. Currently he writes computer security software.

External link

• John Draper's homepage