As Captain Crunch told Esquire Magazine in 1971, “I’m learning about a system. Many phreaks viewed the phones as one large computer system that could be radically altered once the infrastructure was known. Some even trained canaries to sing the tone. A phreak named John Draper learned from others that the toy whistle found in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal produced the precise 2600 hertz frequency needed to manipulate the phone system-and he earned the name Captain Crunch in the doing. Today we’d call him a white hat hacker he often reported his own fraud to the phone company, hoping they would hire him. One of the earliest phone phreaks, Joybubbles was a blind man with perfect pitch who could hum the tones. Before the days of Apple, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built and sold blue boxes. Then, they could mimic the tones either by whistling or by purchasing a blue box device (an illegal preprogramed dialler), altogether circumventing the operator. #Cereal whistle phone PatchPhreaks learned to record the tones the operator dialed to patch the call through. Phreaking worked because the phone was a sociotechnical system, with operators holding most of the power. Since each number dialed emitted a tone, phreaks learned that if they identified the tones and codes used by the telephone company, they could route their own calls. Of course, in order to get into that system, these explorers had to rely on either perfect pitch-like Josef “Joybubbles” Engressia, featured in this video, or some other hack to emit a 2600 hertz. The famed media theorist Marshall McLuhan dubbed the phone “an irresistible intruder in time and space.” In the 1950s, freaks (renamed phreaks in 1971) were the original phone intruders as they explored the telephone system by dialing around and listening to the clicks and beeps.
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