FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco.
Hence why “2600” is referenced.
Hence why “2600” is referenced.
A phreaker going by Joybubbles was the first to exploit the tone by whistling. Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was found to be able to produce the tone, leading to further exploit by John Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.
You can 3D print the whistle these days for a bit of nostalgia.
Woz spoke at UC Berkeley (might have been 1998 commencement), and I asked him to sign an issue of 2600 magazine. After he signed it he flipped through it and asked if 2600 was still good and worth reading because he was thinking of getting a subscription for his son.
Joybubbles (formerly Joe Engressia) specifically denied being the first. In this interview (no timestamp), he mentions having heard of others phreaking as far back as the 50s: https://www.2600.com/offthehook/mp3files/1991/off_the_hook__...
He also demonstrates whistling 2600hz during that interview, including doing so on one of the only US trunks in service at the time still using it for supervision.
> Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was found to be able to produce the tone, leading to further exploit by John Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.
Not true, even he admitted, belatedly, that Denny Teresi introduced him to it:
> https://www.dailydot.com/debug/john-draper-beyond-the-little...
> Denny called me and told me about this whistle that blew the magic tone that disconnects long distance phone calls, and that he had a spare. He asked me if I could drive him to San Francisco so he could show me how it worked.
"The stark shift happened fast; in 1995, the number of pay phones in the U.S. peaked at 2.6 million, Slate reported in 2022. In less than three decades, that's dwindled to fewer than 100,000."
I was born in the very late 1970's, so I had the pleasure of trying to build my own Blue Box just as payphones were starting to see their death in the early 1990's. It was my first real attempt to be part of a group I felt I belonged with; the hackers. I grew up with the verbal history I mentioned, which as you pointed out is factually incorrect, but I cannot deny the power that mythos had over my thinking for the last few decades.
Always important to remember that the telecom revolution was underway in 1890, let alone 1990. I still think the telephone system trumps the Internet in terms of revolutionary impact on society.
Anyway, I assume these as well as the tone are also a strong inspiration for the name.
WAS not IS. It was phased out sometime in the 80s.
I miss those days. Crawling in dumpsters at the local CO, staying up until 5a, on a school night, because you'd just discovered something really, really cool.
And "Blue Boxes" exploited the 2600Hz signal to make free phone calls, explained here under "Operation": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box
Steve Wozniak built Blue Boxes and Steve Jobs sold them: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-an...
Was a common supervision tone used by the NA toll network prior to the introduction of SS7. Also practically everyone here knows (or ought to) that already, given that Jobs and Woz dabbled in making Blue Boxes for profit, and Blue Boxes produced 2600hz (along with the set of MF tones used to encode numbers). The fact you posted your redundant FYI with a mobile wikipedia link (phoneposting) is even more egregious.