Phreakin' 'Eck...

As a short aside to last night's scribble, I mentioned telephone 'phreaking' in the piece. This was a practice popular in the 1960s and 70s that persisted well into the 1980s, which basically amounted to obtaining free phone calls on the public telephone system by various means. Back in those days this seemed like a big deal and it was seen as one in the eye for the establishment: a bit counter-culture, if you will. A version of this was famously alluded to in the 1983 film WarGames, where Mathew Broderick's character hacks a call in a payphone booth with some earth-calling chicanery involving a beer can ring-pull [itself an artefact now consigned to history] to short one of the transmitter terminals to ground.

Whilst thinking about this, I was reminded of a couple of characters in the history of phone phreaking. First was the godfather of the practice, or at the very least one of its most prominent exponents: John Draper, a computer programmer now aged 82, who went by various nicknames, but mostly Captain Crunch, after the eponymous US breakfast cereal, Cap'n Crunch. Gifted with boxes of the cereal were toy boatswain's whistles, which Draper used to gain free long-distance phone calls by imitating the calling tones used by the phone system.

The second character was directly  befriended by and influenced by Draper, Ron Rosenbaum, et al. and their antics: Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, who for some time built and sold little 'Blue Boxes' with Steve Jobs that were the digital equivalent of the original Blue Boxes, themselves analogue electronic versions of the plastic whistles, that had been developed in the sixties, and written about by Rosenbaum, which sparked Woz's interest in the art. Innocent but illegal fun that got Draper, at least, some prison time. Woz apparently considered his design work on the Blue Box as some of the best he ever did. Genius oft springs from playful anarchy, methinks...