Capt'n Crunch

[Mugwump]

Meet John Draper, the hacker who inspired Apple?s founders

John Draper fiddles with the mouthpiece of the little blue box on the table, blowing into it over and over again. It?s 1972, and a nervous Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak look on anxiously, hoping he can make their makeshift device work. If he?s successful, they?ll be able to call anywhere in the world for free, manipulating the complex phone system with little more than a series of perfect tones. This is Draper?s gift to the world, and his curse.

Wozniak and Jobs only know Draper by his notorious pseudonym, Captain Crunch, the elusive character at the center of an underground subculture of rebel hackers called the phone phreaks.

Tilting the device?s mouthpiece and mumbling about Wozniak?s digital redesign, Draper finally gets it to work. He asks who they want to call first. Wozniak doesn?t hesitate: the Pope.

Huddled around the blue box in a darkened student dorm at the University of California, Berkeley, the group dials out to Vatican City. After several attempts, the call goes through. It feels like magic. Draper holds out the handset to Wozniak just as someone answers on the other line.

?This is Henry Kissinger, I must talk to the Pope right away. I must confess my crimes,? Wozniak declared, Draper recalls decades later, his voice cackling.

?Sir, but the Pope isn?t here right now,? a confused clergyman allegedly replied. ?It?s four in the morning in the Vatican. The Pope is sleeping. Just one moment.?

Draper, now 74, pauses and grins as he recounts the story. He looks slightly disheveled, with a wiry gray beard, unassuming.

Wozniak and Jobs, of course, would go on to found the most successful tech company in the world. But Draper is far from being just an important footnote in Apple?s history. He?s the original hacking prankster, a purist driven by curiosity and craftsmanship, with a lifetime of exploits that have pushed technological and legal boundaries. And according to Jobs, in a rare 1994 interview, without him there wouldn?t have been Apple.

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https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/john-draper-captain-crunch/