But he had another first as well: he went on to write the first word processor for the IBM PC. But instead of giving up the hobby, he kept at it and eventually used his phone phreak knowledge to wire tap the San Francisco field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation! (He was doing it just as a lark, but somehow that didn’t make the feds feel any better.) He ended up being the first phone phreak to serve time in a federal prison.
#Blind man whistle phone free
In 1972 he was convicted of a felony and fined $1,000 for making a free telephone call to a radio station in Australia. Unfortunately, Draper hasn’t always had the best judgment and proceeded to repeatedly get in trouble with the law. He was instantly hooked and got really into it. Through a freak coincidence he ended up meeting some blind kids who introduced him to phone phreaking in the late 1960s. John Draper, aka “Captain Crunch,” is a smart, eccentric fellow and a gifted electronics technician. Like the phone hacking subculture, his activities seemed to span from a more innocent to a less innocent time. John Draper is an interesting character in your book. And finally, the telephone is a great equalizer between the sighted and the blind: as one person observed, we’re all blind on the telephone.
#Blind man whistle phone how to
In addition, you have to remember that back in the 1960s and 1970s, long-distance phone calls were really expensive, so blind folks with a far-flung network of friends had a real economic incentive to figure out how to make free phone calls. One is that many blind people spent a lot of time on the telephone, since their friendships were often more geographically spread out than sighted people. No one seems to know for sure, but I have a few thoughts here. Do you have any thoughts on why this was the case? Prior to that, it seemed to be a hobby entirely made up of teenage boys and young men.Ī large percentage of the original phone hackers were blind. But his motivation in doing this was really just to see if it could be done – he told me about making calls from a pay phone that would loop around from one city to another and come back to a pay phone right next to him, just for the sake of doing it!Īnd by the way, I’ve yet to find any real “Eve”s in phone phreaking, at least until the early 1980s. By imitating this tone he could place his own long distance calls for free. The earliest phone phreak I’ve been able to identify was a young man who went by the nickname “Davy Crockett.” Back in the mid-1950s he figured out how to use a Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute – a little 50-cent whistle they used to sell at Woolworth stores – to mimic a special tone that telephone operators used to communicate with one another. Who would you consider the Adam (or Eve) of phone phreaking? How did they get started and how far did they take it?
You can think of phone phreaks as the original network hackers. Later, the term morphed into someone who wanted to break into computers. In this way, “phone phreak” is a bit like the word “hacker” – a hacker originally was someone who was curious about computers and wanted to learn how they work, and how to make them work better. It also came come to have a more pejorative meaning, which is someone who is interested in making free phone calls. That is, figuring out how the telephone works, how calls get routed from one place to another, and understanding various “glitches” in the network.
In its original meaning, a phone phreak is someone who is obsessively interested in learning about, playing with, or exploring the telephone system. We interview Phil Lapsley whose book, Exploding the Phone, chronicles the early phone hackers who learned to exploit the weaknesses in AT&T’s phone system.
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