cap'n crunch in cyberspace

John T. Draper aka 'Cap'n crunch'

So, lets go back to the year 1972, when I got a phone call from Denny, a blind kid who turned me onto a toy whistle out of a Cap'n Crunch cereal box. With this whistle, it was possible to access the internal trunking mechanism of Ma Bell.

In conjunction with a blue box (A special tone generating device), it was possible to take internal control of Ma Bell's long distance switching equipment. During those turbulent times, I got hooked up with the People's Computer Club in Menlo park and took Steve Wozniak to one of their Pot Luck dinners.

I met Steve Wozniak at UC Berkeley in the Winter of 1971. He begged me to come and show him how to use a blue box he just built from information he obtained from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine "Secrets of the Little Blue Box", and the Bell System Journals from the UC Library. Woz talked me into visiting him at the dorm, where he made his famous call to the Pope. The Woz was working at HP at the time, and I brought him to a pot luck dinner hosted my PCC (People's Computer Company). Shortly after that, these pot luck dinners evolved into the Home Brew Computer Club.

A few months later Intel announced the 8080 Microprocessor chip. Steve Wozniak got his hands on some 6502 chips and built the first 6502 computer that eventually became the Apple I. Naturally, neither the phone companies or the authorities took kindly to my blue box "experiments" I was performing on their equipment, so they tracked me down and filed charges, convicting me under Title 18, Section 1343 : Fraud by wire. While serving time, I got sentenced to a "Work Furlough" program, and was allowed to continue my programming work. I wrote the first word processor for the Apple II computer, which was the first word processor that printed in true proportional spacing on the Qume printer, provided to me by Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple Computer.

At that time, I called the program "TextWriter" until Steve Sawyer suggested the name "EasyWriter" after seeing the movie "Easy Rider". The name stuck... Thus was born the FIRST word processor for the Apple II. In 1980, IBM was sneaking around, looking for an outside company to port their word processor to their new machine. At this time, I had my own company "Cap'n Software". IBM contacted US to port our word processor to their new machine. The rest is history.

The device I'm holding in my hand is just a Radio Shack Touch Tone dialer. However, these look just like blue boxes. A blue box has a dial just like the one I'm holding, except it has an additional button which sends a 2600 Hz tone. This clears down the original call, and opens up a trunk that "Listens" for these special audible tones. A "Cap'n Crunch" whistle does nothing more than send a 2600 Hz tone or note. In the late 60's and Early 70's, all toll trunks were sensitive to this tone. This is because ATT Long lines did a fatal cost cutting measure, they designed the system so that signaling and voice used the same circuit. Only problem was that it literally opened up the phone companies internal dial circuits to anyone with a "blue box". Today, the phone companies(s) no longer do this. Signaling takes place on a separate path from the one you talk on. Sending 2600 Hz tone down the line usually results in nothing.