Vintage 1960's Cap'N Crunch Bo'Son Whistle Blue Phone Phreaker | Hacker News Reader

Vintage 1960's Cap'N Crunch Bo'Son Whistle Blue Phone Phreaker

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29 pointsmartindale14 comments

One of my first electronics projects was modifying a Radio Shack tone dialer into a "red box." It was too late for it to work on most payphones but I actually got it to work one time in a Target lobby. Then I realized I didn't really have anyone to call.

I did the same thing in high school. The best I could figure out was to call my dad at work which at least was considered "long distance" despite being only 50 miles away. I do not miss the old Bell pricing model.

For the benefit of our foreign readers, most Americans thought our addressing scheme was coincident with our billing scheme, but it definitely was not.

We addressed phones and routed calls via area codes, but billed based on LATA. In practice if most of your calls were either across the country or across the neighborhood it didn't matter, but in the last days of BBSes being popular due to massive weirdness in the billing models it was often cheaper to call a BBS across the country than to call a BBS in your LATA but outside the local area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_are...

It had its strange charm as sort of a logic puzzle.

Had a friend nail up a dual-channel ISDN connection 24 hours, 7 days a week for over a month after very carefully determining with his local carrier that it was considered close enough not to trigger call metering.

Unfortunately the billing department didn't get the memo and he ended up with a 50k bill from AT & T. I don't miss those days, either, mate.

Fantastic, a real piece of history! I had the pleasure of a long video chat with "Cap'n Crunch" a while back... the guy has so many quality stories that I sincerely hope he is busy writing an autobiography. I was a wee lad while all the real phreaking fun went on but reading the stories in Hugo Cornwall's "Hackers Handbook" (after it was un-banned by the local library) piqued my interest and pretty soon I was trying to hook up my BBC Micro to an old 300 baud modem and connecting to an X25 PAD at the local university... fun times. I mean f.......u........n........t.......i......+++ATH0 "damn!" re-dial....

Can whoever buys this please create a 3D scan? I don't have $400 to spend on a tiny plastic toy, but I'd love to make one on a 3D printer!

John Draper (Cap'N Crunch) has been very sick in recent years. I was following his posts on Facebook till he removed himself from there. Here is an old article about it:

https://www.qikfunder.com/crowdfund/help-john-draper-captain...

Some context, for anyone not familiar with Blue Boxes/phreaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

Prior to this, folks (Joybubbles etc.) would just whistle the 2600hz trunk reset tone.

Isn't the Blue Box what Wozniak was initially selling?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUf1d-GuK0Q

Hence the name of 2600 Magazine.

Alright I think I've got this straight. Here's my best attempt at a summary for this thing:

John Draper is/was a Phreaker aka a phone hacker. He discovered that this toy (from a Cap'n Crunch cereal box) could be used to whistle into an old phone and make free long distance phone calls. Because of that, he was given the nickname Cap'n Crunch. He is now declining in health.

In the late 60's I wanted to call my girlfriend for free across the country using tones. I looked up the phone company spec's in the college library. After figuring out the tones needed I went into the EE lab and made a tape recording of an audio oscillator. Then to make a call I played the tape into the phone. Worked great.

I hope the person who bought this knew that it wouldn't make free phone calls any more.

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