The beeping hackers
Maybe you didn't know, but the first tool of hackers was not a computer but a whistle. And that's the one from the cereal box.
In the 1960s, the cereal manufacturer (you know Corn Flakes and company) Cap'n Crunch began adding various gifts to the boxes in an attempt to increase sales. The most famous were whistles called Bo'sun. The whistle is supposed to be a kind of replica of a sailor's whistle, the one used to signal various events and orders on ships. Cap'n is an abbreviation for captain.
And here comes John Draper, a former electronics engineer who worked for the US Air Force. John was a member of a group of telephone "phreaks" who knew how to cheat the then telephone system and make free calls. How? By dropping a certain tone into the handset, which gives the telephone connection the role of an operator, which means that the calls are free. But you have to get to that beep somehow. "Phreaks" therefore produced a wide variety of devices, which were rather awkward to use, especially in telephone booths. Well, Draper found that the Bo'sun whistle emits a 2600 Hz whistle, which is exactly the frequency that was being sought. So it was enough to pick up the receiver, beep into it, and you were already an operator. John liked the whistle so much that you he nicknamed Captain Crunch. Draper later became known as the maker of the so-called "blue boxes", which were of course illegal, as they sent the mentioned tone, as well as some other useful one, into the telephone line.
And why is this whistle and John Draper so important? On the one hand, because these phone "phreaks" were basically the first hackers, even though they weren't called that yet, and on the other hand, because without the "blue boxes" there wouldn't be - Apple. Steve Jobs himself admitted this in an interview. When he and Steve Wozniak were still in high school, they sought out Draper and he showed them some of the first hacking "techniques" and showed them how the "blue boxes" worked. They were boys so overwhelmed by everything that they even spent some time selling these boxes to budding "phreaks". And from this business collaboration between the two Steves, Apple Computers was born in 1975.
But what was the fate of Draper? Also interesting. He spent some time in prison for fraud, then in the mid-1970s he built the first working word processor, and in the 1990s the first effective firewall. And what is he doing now? He is currently defending himself against allegations of sexual harassment at several tech conferences…
Source: Atlas Obscura
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