![]() ![]() : All this did not sit well with Steve Jobs and the other managers at Apple, who thought the Charley Board product was a bit too risky and, besides, they disliked Draper to begin with. He was asking for it, he was looking for trouble. “I tell you,” Condon says, “Draper was the kiss of death. : And as a rule universally agreed upon within their group, they avoided John Draper and his friends like the plague. While he may be an iconic figure in lore, even if undeserved, it is important to better understand what kind of person he was during this time. Given that most of Draper’s modern reputation is based on his ‘discovery’ of the whistle, something he has done nothing to dispel or come clean about, I feel it is important to help set the record straight. We called him ‘Captain’ a lot.” Captain Crunch was born. That’d be a good name.” Engressia immediately liked it. One day Draper and Engressia were talking about using a Cap’n Crunch whistle to make their beloved 2,600 Hz tone, Engressia recalls, when Draper suddenly said, “You know, I think I’ll just call myself Captain Crunch. ![]() : (late summer of 1970) It was on one of those conference calls that John Draper discovered a new identity for himself. With Draper in the club the whistle trips expanded. Armed with their Cap’n Crunch whistles Fettgather and Teresi and friends would cluster around pay phones at the airport and go nuts. : Several years earlier a Los Angeles phone phreak named Sid Bernay had discovered you could generate a nice, clean 2,600 Hz tone simply by covering one of the holes in the plastic toy bosun whistle that was given away as a prize in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Lapsley’s research put him in touch with many players of the time, and the real story emerged: Phil Lapsley wrote a book titled “ Exploding the Phone” that gives an exhaustive history of phone phreaking and is a must read for anyone interested in the topic. While some in the industry have had doubts or heard tale that Draper did not discover the whistle’s significant tone, it wasn’t until last year that we finally got a definitive answer and story. And this isn’t limited to more obscure sites, this ‘fact’ is still repeated by mainstream media articles. These include the Snopes message board, a telephone tribute site, high school papers, and other archival sites. Google around for tales of Draper and the whistle will find a variety of sites that say he discovered it. Air Force to serve as a radio technician was fascinated with telephony and took courses on the subject at college and discovered the whistle that catapulted him to crime, infamy, and misfortune. Parker carried the myth:Ī young man just entering the U.S. Not long after Engressia shared this information with the other phreakers, John Draper discovered that a toy boatswain’s whistle that was included in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the late 1960s could blow a perfect 2600Hz tone.Įven going back to 1983, a book titled “ Fighting Computer Crime” by Donn B. Even recently, a magazine known for intelligent geeky facts parroted this falsehood: I say ‘almost’ a fact, because so many people believe it, and so many people have written about it as if it were fact. It is almost a ‘fact’ that John Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, discovered that a toy whistle in a box of cereal could be used to make free phone calls. The tl dr cliffnotes: John Draper was not the first to discover that a Cap’n Crunch whistle could be used for phreaking.
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