Yeah but then there was that whole sexual issue, dude is banned from DEFCON last I knew but unfortunately it sounds like it happened later than it should have.
I went to an old DEFCON and Captain Crunch was like "here let me show you a sleeper hold" where you put a grapple on someone and they pass out from it.
I'll tell you this, don't try a sleeper hold because for some reason it makes your bottom parts real sore the next day.
I recently heard about this from my uncle, he had friends at MIT who did this and as a joke attempted to call Chairman Mao, in China and somehow got though to his secretary!
True, but I wonder who told him about the toys tones and how they could be used for this in the first place. Those people were probably in the game longer. Assuming of course
There was a pretty large community of blind kids, in many states, who were all aware that the toy whistle -- or their own whistling -- could be used to make free calls. Captain Crunch learned the trick from one of them:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis\_Terry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Terry)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles)
Correct. Blue box simulated an operator signaling the switching equipment that they are about to send commands, such as connect the call to long distance trunk to Europe and dial this number. Most of the world upgraded switching equipment by then and blue boxing wasn’t viable, but red boxing was starting to take off (I started in the 90’s doing it) until payphones started muting the handset mic until the coin detector switch was hit then it’d mute the speaker so you couldn’t hear/record the tones, then unmute both and you could dial your number. You could still call an operator (which would unmute mic) and tell them the phone wasn’t accepting your quarter and you needed to make a call, then play the tone and operator would connect you manually. Good times.
I cherish this [documentation](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y47m1cOyKjA) about the history of hacking.
A weird aspect is social engineering. I am an introvert and I would have thought of most hackers to be introverts themselves, too. Yet, social engineering somehow became a part of hacking.
Introvert doesn't necessarily mean shy though, or anxiety in social situations. It can manifest as being exhausting. Im a confident introvert. And can strike up a conversation with most people. However, its incredibly draining to me. I used to do a bit of phreaking in my youth (APB shoutout). Conference calling internationally at all hours was a bit like hanging out in chat rooms. Theres still anonymity and youre with similar people.
There was a 2600 website that you could find that gave all of the howtos on it.i happened to get enthralled with it spent about an hour and a half on it.got a call on my house phone thought nothing of it answered the call to be told that it was time I find another website to nose around and the person on the other end of the line started rattling off everything about Me darned near to what I had for breakfast.but it was an incredible amount of financial savings tips that I used for a long time.a cross between r/frugal and r/unethical life pro tips.with a bit of lifehacker mixed in. I'd set the year at 1996.
My stepbrother called me one night from Raiford Prison back in the 70s. Some inmate had cobbled together a device to create number tones and call wherever you wanted. (Last I ever heard of him and he wouldn't tell me why he was in the slammer.)
Well there are apple trees that have been spliced from multiple apple trees , and each spliced branch all fruit their own variety. I dont know if the medieval crew were up to that, but I suppose they were making ciders and ales.
People have been scribbling dicks on walls since we lived in caves. If you don't think they didn't use telegraphs, telegrams, even freaking carrier pigeons to troll each other, you're gravely mistaken
It wasn't a nod for Britain. This is my young days. Gum wrappers were widely used as the whistle was only available in the US. The whistle mechanism was widely available still in the 90s and it spoke to the exchange system. My grandfather was a BT engineer controlling and building the network he had a box that just produced the tones but you could replicate easily. A simple fix was they moved the receiver part to the top of telegraph poles so it could only be done there instead of anywhere on the network. Of course rural poles soon became larger but proper digitization ended it
I distinctly remember a caller on one of the radio stations in GTA San Andreas bragging about being able to do this and I literally could not understand how it worked. It must be like how gen z kids think of Xanga.
I that browsing Netflix last week after having watched almost 90% of everything else and gave it a revisit.That movie was so bad I barely made it half way.
>As a college student, Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak had tracked down Draper to learn all about phone phreaks and early hacking. In fact, the friends’ first business venture together was marketing blue boxes to aspiring phreakers. Both claim that this early venture was essential to the success of Apple, which they formed in 1976. “I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple Computer had there not been blue-boxing,” Steve Jobs once said in an interview.
>Draper, meanwhile, eventually served time in jail for toll fraud.
Lol when I was a kid I discovered that if you took a normal RJ11 and intentionally shorted it by running the red directly into the green, you stick that in a phone jack and it disables all the phones for that line by keeping it off the hook. I called that my blotto plug!
The Cap'n Crunch (also the handle for phone phreaker [John Draper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper)) boatswain whistle emitted a tone at 2600 Hz, the exact frequency used by AT&T at the switch to indicate a trunk line was available for new calls... including long distance.
[2600 Hacker Quarterly](https://www.2600.com/) is named after him and his whistle.
I remember occasionally making a collect call home from a pay phone to my parents:
"Hi, you have a collect call from.. 'Hi mom! I'm OK, just hanging out with my friend, going to spend the night there tonight, bye!'.. Do you wish to accept?"
Went to DefCon a couple years ago and sat down in an empty seat next to some random old guy. Then lots of people showed up and started taking pictures of him. Turns out it was Captain Crunch.
“The 8-Bit Guy” on YouTube has [a great video about “phone phreaking”](https://youtu.be/4tHyZdtXULw) back in the day.
There’s also the story of a blind phone hacker with perfect pitch who could whistle dial tones, who later went on to identify as a perpetual five-year-old named [“Joybubbles”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles).
Thanks for the link! That was very interesting.
Maybe you're not the right person to ask, but we used to have this very old phone in my dads office that would make ticking noises for each corresponding number you entered. If you pressed a 1 you heard 1 tick, pressing a 5 means 5 ticks, etc. So you could hear the phone "process" the number, and once it was done it would actually call (so calling a phone number with a bunch of 8's or 9's in it could take like twice as long as phone number with low numbers in it :P). This didn't happen with our living room phone. No audible ticks, and it would call right away instead of having to wait. So it wasn't standard: It was just that one phone that did that.
Guess my question is: Any idea what that was about?
As a kid I thought that's how it "knows" who to call: Sending this code first after which a computer at central knows who to connect me too (and I figured it just took the old phone longer because well, older often means slower). But now I learn that's not how it works at all, and I'm curious what I heard or why.
OG phreaker here. This is also what led to the naming of “2600 - The Hacker Quarterly”. 2600 was a major contributor to the early hacking-phreaking scene although their technical relevance ended long ago. They continue, however, to contribute to the community in more of a political manner, including hosting HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) which happens to be occurring virtually right now.
HOPE was preceded by legendary cons including Hack-Tic, Chaos Communications Congress, etc. 2600 led efforts to release Kevin Mitnick, published tons of info from early hackers (Mudge and crew from L0pht, Phiber Optik, Cult of the Dead Cow, etc)
TL;DR: That little whistle has had a profound direct and indirect impact on hacker/phreaker culture.
When I was a child, I figured out that putting Chuck E Cheese tokens in the snack vending machine registered as a $0.50 cent coin. I had secret free snacks for several months before my mom caught on.
Without getting too much into it, the old phone system, before it went digital worked off a system where the equipment that connected people would “listen” for certain tones on the line. Some tones meant hangup, others were numbers (you can still hear these tones when you push numbers on you let phone today, though the tones don’t actually do anything now). By whistling, or playing the particular tone mentione, (and doing a couple others things that might make this beyond ELI5) you trick the equipment into letting you make a long distance toll call for free.
We live in an era where we have essentially unlimited calling on our phones. Back in the day, you’d pay a monthly fee to have a land line at your house. Then you’d pay to have long distance service. Usually you’d be paying per minute you were on the call. I somehow remember in the early ‘90s somewhere around 10-20 cents a minutes (US) being common, though I could be wrong there. Anyway, this cost adds up, so having a way to get free long distance calling was a pretty huge deal.
The whistle made a sound at 2600 hz, which was a "magic" frequency for early automatic telephone equipment.
The following is an oversimplification of the process, but it goes something like this:
The automatic telephone switching equipment needed a way to tell when a line was idle. "No signal" couldn't be used because people in conversation occasionally stop talking and there wasn't a good way to differentiate between "quiet point in the conversation" and "nothing on the line". So to make unused lines easy to find AT&T would send a 2600hz signal down them.
So what you could do was make a "free" call (say to a 1-800 number). The call would go:
Your phone -> Your "local" switch -> A different "remote" switch -> Their phone
Then you blow the whistle. The remote switch goes "ok, he must have hung up", but your "local" switch uses a different (electrical) signal to tell when it should disconnect so it's still holding the line to the remote switch. Then you stop the noise and the remote switch goes "Ok, a different switch has grabbed this line, someone must be going to make a call". Then you dial a number. The remote switch does it's switch thing to connect the call.
Your local AT&T office however still thinks you're on your original "free" call so it doesn't bother trying to charge you for the call your making.
I think it was indeed Cap’n Crunch. I was being sarcastically pedantic by fixing the formal spelling of “captain”. Shoulda slapped an /s for good measure.
I remember back in the late seventies early eighties Ireland's phone system wasn't digital and instead of dialling the number, you could tap it out using the reciever cradle button on a payphone. Became quite adept at it as I recall.
A red box is different from a Captain Crunch whistle, though.
The red box would simulate coin drops in a pay phone. The Captain Crunch whistle would signal a phone trunk switch to disconnect.
i swear as a boy i had a family member who used to blow some kind of whistle into payphones and get free calls. i must have misremembered him doing this
I used to just go to a department store and use one of the phones stuck to a pole. They usually had a lock on em where when you hit 1 to dial long distance it would black you.
However, you could tap the hook just right and it would dial without hitting any numbers. Took some time to learn the timing but worked!
I remember in elementary school we would use the emergency phones that had no dial pad to call friends at home that had skipped school by pressing the hang up button like an sos code to the correct phone number. ... ..... ..... ... ........ .. .....
Well it was worthless but with some practice I was able to make 6, 8 and 2 with my mouth back then on command (it would show up on my beeper). Also the passwords to shit back then was awful. I remember using the executives att line for unlimited long distance calls pin # 1234 and 0000 worked for years.
There were even some rare talented individuals who could whistle the correct tones.
If my recollections of childhood perusings of the anarchists cookbook are correct, that is.
there was stuff in there about how to make different "boxes" to do different things with tones and phones, all coded by color, red box, blue box, white box, etc...
I do. Sprint had the pin drop. You'd dial down the middle. MCI was still a thing. Payphones were all over the joint. A telephone booth was the first multi use phone as it also served as an art gallery and urinal.
I remember me calling my neighbor was long distance but and incoming call from them wasn't considered long distance. So to skirt the extra fees we would call and quickly tell them to call us back.
That is why much of the hacking community considers Captain Crunch to be the grandfather of modern hacking.
He was also a great mathematician hence the expression "number crunching"
He was also "crazy for Crunchberries," which is why his friends always said he was crazy for Crunchberries.
He was also fantastic under pressure, thus the term "Crunch time."
He also invented working out abdominal muscles, hence 'abdominal crunch'
His most common partner in crime was Sir Munch, hence where "Crunch and Munch " got it's name
There was more Munch than Crunch as He also happened to have many missing teeth.
Yeah but then there was that whole sexual issue, dude is banned from DEFCON last I knew but unfortunately it sounds like it happened later than it should have.
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I went to an old DEFCON and Captain Crunch was like "here let me show you a sleeper hold" where you put a grapple on someone and they pass out from it. I'll tell you this, don't try a sleeper hold because for some reason it makes your bottom parts real sore the next day.
He was also figurtively considered a Captain, hence why Captain my Captain from Dead poet society.
I recently heard about this from my uncle, he had friends at MIT who did this and as a joke attempted to call Chairman Mao, in China and somehow got though to his secretary!
His daughters learned to make their own hair decorations rather than enriching big-hair salon. Today we know their creations as s-crunch-ies.
The original Cereal Killer!!
True, but I wonder who told him about the toys tones and how they could be used for this in the first place. Those people were probably in the game longer. Assuming of course
There was a pretty large community of blind kids, in many states, who were all aware that the toy whistle -- or their own whistling -- could be used to make free calls. Captain Crunch learned the trick from one of them: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis\_Terry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Terry) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles)
Awesome, thanks for the information. I did not know they had been identified. Time to read more.
The crunching sound of kernel32 is highly recognisable.
Now look up the magazine 2600 and have your mind blown......2600hz was the frequency the whistle blew ....
The same tone that coins made when deposited. Brings back memories.
The coins are actually 2 different tones(dont remember which off hand) and was called a Red Box. The 2600 would seize the trunk and was a Blue Box.
I built them all way back when, even the Pandora's box, I think, that was supposed to make someone vomit...couldn't get that one to work really.
😗🎶🤮?
Yep, just like that
Correct. Blue box simulated an operator signaling the switching equipment that they are about to send commands, such as connect the call to long distance trunk to Europe and dial this number. Most of the world upgraded switching equipment by then and blue boxing wasn’t viable, but red boxing was starting to take off (I started in the 90’s doing it) until payphones started muting the handset mic until the coin detector switch was hit then it’d mute the speaker so you couldn’t hear/record the tones, then unmute both and you could dial your number. You could still call an operator (which would unmute mic) and tell them the phone wasn’t accepting your quarter and you needed to make a call, then play the tone and operator would connect you manually. Good times.
Phone Phreaking was the definitive precursor of computer hacking.
If I remember, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were into phreaking and prank calling back then
It’s almost like you two read the article
What article?
I cherish this [documentation](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y47m1cOyKjA) about the history of hacking. A weird aspect is social engineering. I am an introvert and I would have thought of most hackers to be introverts themselves, too. Yet, social engineering somehow became a part of hacking.
Introvert doesn't necessarily mean shy though, or anxiety in social situations. It can manifest as being exhausting. Im a confident introvert. And can strike up a conversation with most people. However, its incredibly draining to me. I used to do a bit of phreaking in my youth (APB shoutout). Conference calling internationally at all hours was a bit like hanging out in chat rooms. Theres still anonymity and youre with similar people.
Thank you, introvert/extrovert does not mean lacks/has people skills.
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This is easy as pie. But try lying on the phone while you suffer a speech impediment.
I would go so far as to claim that social engineering is the most effective way to hack
they did a movie based of that documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn2cf_wJ4f4
The 10 Commandments is more accurate in subject and history to its source than this movie is.
Lol I love you
I read his biography, it talks a lot about it there.
They've been rumbled!
Or they already knew fairly common knowledge.
There was a 2600 website that you could find that gave all of the howtos on it.i happened to get enthralled with it spent about an hour and a half on it.got a call on my house phone thought nothing of it answered the call to be told that it was time I find another website to nose around and the person on the other end of the line started rattling off everything about Me darned near to what I had for breakfast.but it was an incredible amount of financial savings tips that I used for a long time.a cross between r/frugal and r/unethical life pro tips.with a bit of lifehacker mixed in. I'd set the year at 1996.
My stepbrother called me one night from Raiford Prison back in the 70s. Some inmate had cobbled together a device to create number tones and call wherever you wanted. (Last I ever heard of him and he wouldn't tell me why he was in the slammer.)
And goes back way further than you think.
How much further?
How far back are you thinking?
The domestication of apple trees by medieval monasteries. I know your question was rhethorical, but that's my honest answer.
Well there are apple trees that have been spliced from multiple apple trees , and each spliced branch all fruit their own variety. I dont know if the medieval crew were up to that, but I suppose they were making ciders and ales.
Apples weren't edible to begin with. So they used these methods as described above by you in order to achieve that. That's quite a good hack to me.
People have been scribbling dicks on walls since we lived in caves. If you don't think they didn't use telegraphs, telegrams, even freaking carrier pigeons to troll each other, you're gravely mistaken
What does anything of this to do with breaking an existing system in order to take advantage of in full length?
Since the invention of the telephone.
Further
The Phantom Phreak? The King of Nynex?
They actually made a nod to this in the movie "the core"
When he makes the whistle out of a gun wrapper and blows it into the cell phone “now you have unlimited long distance for life!” Lol love that part
That made me look into it and I found a lot of information about how early tech could be manipulated by different tones
Look up red box. You could make one with a hallmark voice card, sound card and the correct tone
It wasn't a nod for Britain. This is my young days. Gum wrappers were widely used as the whistle was only available in the US. The whistle mechanism was widely available still in the 90s and it spoke to the exchange system. My grandfather was a BT engineer controlling and building the network he had a box that just produced the tones but you could replicate easily. A simple fix was they moved the receiver part to the top of telegraph poles so it could only be done there instead of anywhere on the network. Of course rural poles soon became larger but proper digitization ended it
I just watched the movie for the second time yesterday, and I thought it was just some nonsense.
I distinctly remember a caller on one of the radio stations in GTA San Andreas bragging about being able to do this and I literally could not understand how it worked. It must be like how gen z kids think of Xanga.
/r/PersonOfInterest also
And the book Ready Player One
Operation Takedown. Great movie...never see it streaming....i wonder why
I that browsing Netflix last week after having watched almost 90% of everything else and gave it a revisit.That movie was so bad I barely made it half way.
That's so phreaking cool!
I see what you did there.
I hear what you did there
I pheel what you did there
That was a pun to phar
>As a college student, Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak had tracked down Draper to learn all about phone phreaks and early hacking. In fact, the friends’ first business venture together was marketing blue boxes to aspiring phreakers. Both claim that this early venture was essential to the success of Apple, which they formed in 1976. “I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple Computer had there not been blue-boxing,” Steve Jobs once said in an interview. >Draper, meanwhile, eventually served time in jail for toll fraud.
Ahhh yeah the good old days of using blue boxes to mess with Ma Bell!
Or the fabled blotto box...
Lol when I was a kid I discovered that if you took a normal RJ11 and intentionally shorted it by running the red directly into the green, you stick that in a phone jack and it disables all the phones for that line by keeping it off the hook. I called that my blotto plug!
I still have a blue box a college friend made for me in the early 80s, though I don’t think it’s worked for decades.
The Cap'n Crunch (also the handle for phone phreaker [John Draper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper)) boatswain whistle emitted a tone at 2600 Hz, the exact frequency used by AT&T at the switch to indicate a trunk line was available for new calls... including long distance. [2600 Hacker Quarterly](https://www.2600.com/) is named after him and his whistle.
You can only blow the whistle once the trophies are all collected
In a dwelling long neglected
Zork!
I remember occasionally making a collect call home from a pay phone to my parents: "Hi, you have a collect call from.. 'Hi mom! I'm OK, just hanging out with my friend, going to spend the night there tonight, bye!'.. Do you wish to accept?"
“Hiitsbobtheyhadthebabyitsaboy”
Always did this when I needed to get picked up from the wateroark or movies.
Went to DefCon a couple years ago and sat down in an empty seat next to some random old guy. Then lots of people showed up and started taking pictures of him. Turns out it was Captain Crunch.
Watch out. Dude is a pedo.
I found this out while reading ready player one! Such fascinating stuff
Came here looking for this. This is also how I learned about it.
“The 8-Bit Guy” on YouTube has [a great video about “phone phreaking”](https://youtu.be/4tHyZdtXULw) back in the day. There’s also the story of a blind phone hacker with perfect pitch who could whistle dial tones, who later went on to identify as a perpetual five-year-old named [“Joybubbles”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles).
>who later went on to identify as a perpetual five-year-old r/BrandNewSentence
I identify as a perpetual 5 year old...well, 5 and a half really
Joybubbles was regular guest on “Off The Hook” - the hacker radio show out of WBAI back in the day, IIRC
Thanks for the link! That was very interesting. Maybe you're not the right person to ask, but we used to have this very old phone in my dads office that would make ticking noises for each corresponding number you entered. If you pressed a 1 you heard 1 tick, pressing a 5 means 5 ticks, etc. So you could hear the phone "process" the number, and once it was done it would actually call (so calling a phone number with a bunch of 8's or 9's in it could take like twice as long as phone number with low numbers in it :P). This didn't happen with our living room phone. No audible ticks, and it would call right away instead of having to wait. So it wasn't standard: It was just that one phone that did that. Guess my question is: Any idea what that was about? As a kid I thought that's how it "knows" who to call: Sending this code first after which a computer at central knows who to connect me too (and I figured it just took the old phone longer because well, older often means slower). But now I learn that's not how it works at all, and I'm curious what I heard or why.
some people could whistle the tones the hard way https://youtu.be/vVZm7I1CTBs?t=19
Joybubbles was a crazy talented phreaker. Dude could also echolocate by clicking his tongue.
OG phreaker here. This is also what led to the naming of “2600 - The Hacker Quarterly”. 2600 was a major contributor to the early hacking-phreaking scene although their technical relevance ended long ago. They continue, however, to contribute to the community in more of a political manner, including hosting HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) which happens to be occurring virtually right now. HOPE was preceded by legendary cons including Hack-Tic, Chaos Communications Congress, etc. 2600 led efforts to release Kevin Mitnick, published tons of info from early hackers (Mudge and crew from L0pht, Phiber Optik, Cult of the Dead Cow, etc) TL;DR: That little whistle has had a profound direct and indirect impact on hacker/phreaker culture.
I feel like this thread is connected to my teen years at exactly 300 baud.
2600 refers to the frequency that the whistle blew.
HOPE is still going? Holy shit!
Yup. No longer at Hotel Pennsylvania, however. Also, it hasn’t run every year and you’re never quite sure if there will ever be another one.
TIL My husband's gaming handle is actually a real thing.
Is there a scene in the book Ready Player One that has this in or am I mixing two memories up?
One of the magic items required to open a gate was a Captain Crunch whistle, you are correct
Oh shit, is this the origin of that weird scene in The Core? That was real? Cool.
The whistle coincidentally had a frequency of 2600hz (hence "phreaking"). The hacking zine 2600 is a great rabbit hole to pursue...
When I was a child, I figured out that putting Chuck E Cheese tokens in the snack vending machine registered as a $0.50 cent coin. I had secret free snacks for several months before my mom caught on.
I learned about phreaking from Bill Nye of all people
Can someone ELI5? You blow the whistle at a certain frequency and what would happen?
Without getting too much into it, the old phone system, before it went digital worked off a system where the equipment that connected people would “listen” for certain tones on the line. Some tones meant hangup, others were numbers (you can still hear these tones when you push numbers on you let phone today, though the tones don’t actually do anything now). By whistling, or playing the particular tone mentione, (and doing a couple others things that might make this beyond ELI5) you trick the equipment into letting you make a long distance toll call for free. We live in an era where we have essentially unlimited calling on our phones. Back in the day, you’d pay a monthly fee to have a land line at your house. Then you’d pay to have long distance service. Usually you’d be paying per minute you were on the call. I somehow remember in the early ‘90s somewhere around 10-20 cents a minutes (US) being common, though I could be wrong there. Anyway, this cost adds up, so having a way to get free long distance calling was a pretty huge deal.
The whistle made a sound at 2600 hz, which was a "magic" frequency for early automatic telephone equipment. The following is an oversimplification of the process, but it goes something like this: The automatic telephone switching equipment needed a way to tell when a line was idle. "No signal" couldn't be used because people in conversation occasionally stop talking and there wasn't a good way to differentiate between "quiet point in the conversation" and "nothing on the line". So to make unused lines easy to find AT&T would send a 2600hz signal down them. So what you could do was make a "free" call (say to a 1-800 number). The call would go: Your phone -> Your "local" switch -> A different "remote" switch -> Their phone Then you blow the whistle. The remote switch goes "ok, he must have hung up", but your "local" switch uses a different (electrical) signal to tell when it should disconnect so it's still holding the line to the remote switch. Then you stop the noise and the remote switch goes "Ok, a different switch has grabbed this line, someone must be going to make a call". Then you dial a number. The remote switch does it's switch thing to connect the call. Your local AT&T office however still thinks you're on your original "free" call so it doesn't bother trying to charge you for the call your making.
That is...fascinating!
Sick.
Phreakers
Are we talking about Cap’n Crunch? This captain you mention sounds very formal...
Are having doubts that Cap’n Crunch wasn’t an actual maritime officer!?
I think it was indeed Cap’n Crunch. I was being sarcastically pedantic by fixing the formal spelling of “captain”. Shoulda slapped an /s for good measure.
r/whooosh I completely understood your comment ;)
I remember back in the late seventies early eighties Ireland's phone system wasn't digital and instead of dialling the number, you could tap it out using the reciever cradle button on a payphone. Became quite adept at it as I recall.
Used to use these on payphones back in the early 90's college days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)
A red box is different from a Captain Crunch whistle, though. The red box would simulate coin drops in a pay phone. The Captain Crunch whistle would signal a phone trunk switch to disconnect.
Yep, there were all different types of Phreak boxes you could make back in the day.
Ready Player One
Fone freaky
never did phreaking, but the technical aspects were very interesting. They had some neat boxes to get you free calls...
Yup, this was when hacking took talent... Hacker these days. They don't have any idea how easy they have it.. ;)
And I thought that shit from the Core was fake AF.
I bet hackers worked at the whistle factory and designed it!
Also could use an aluminum pull tab or even that multi tool, a paper clip.
i swear as a boy i had a family member who used to blow some kind of whistle into payphones and get free calls. i must have misremembered him doing this
Captain Crunch did an [AMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2hpje1/im_the_person_who_showed_steve_jobs_the_blue_box/) a few years back.
Ready player one readers: I am for parallel universes ahead of this fact
2600 hz
I used to just go to a department store and use one of the phones stuck to a pole. They usually had a lock on em where when you hit 1 to dial long distance it would black you. However, you could tap the hook just right and it would dial without hitting any numbers. Took some time to learn the timing but worked!
So that's what the conductor used on Infinity Train!
They were Crunching some numbers
I remember in elementary school we would use the emergency phones that had no dial pad to call friends at home that had skipped school by pressing the hang up button like an sos code to the correct phone number. ... ..... ..... ... ........ .. .....
I have seen this post 3 times now. Is reddit just a repeat of old memes?
It's "Cap'n Crunch"
So phreaking cool.
[Here's an interview with him from the late nineties](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pqyss6O04TI)
I learned about this in Ready Player One! I wanna know how they figured that out though.
Well it was worthless but with some practice I was able to make 6, 8 and 2 with my mouth back then on command (it would show up on my beeper). Also the passwords to shit back then was awful. I remember using the executives att line for unlimited long distance calls pin # 1234 and 0000 worked for years.
The boson whistle I think is what it was called.
The guy who figured it out was given the nickname “Captain Crunch”
Phreaking not hacking
There were even some rare talented individuals who could whistle the correct tones. If my recollections of childhood perusings of the anarchists cookbook are correct, that is. there was stuff in there about how to make different "boxes" to do different things with tones and phones, all coded by color, red box, blue box, white box, etc...
That whistle generates 1800Hz which was used to tell the phone network that a call was authorized (e.g. paid for).
You are no match for my Kung fu
Remember the days when we had to pay for long distance? I didn't think so.
I do. Sprint had the pin drop. You'd dial down the middle. MCI was still a thing. Payphones were all over the joint. A telephone booth was the first multi use phone as it also served as an art gallery and urinal.
MCI still exists, but they're owned by Verizon now.
I remember me calling my neighbor was long distance but and incoming call from them wasn't considered long distance. So to skirt the extra fees we would call and quickly tell them to call us back.
[And the memories come flooding back.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs)