The Twilight Years of Cap'n Crunch

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Tech pioneer John Draper, a legendary, eccentric figure in Silicon Valley better known as Cap'n Crunch, has slipped to the margins while his peers became rich, the Wall Street Journal writes in a profile. Draper was a 'phone phreak' and helped develop the technology for word processing and voice-activated telephone menus; meanwhile, he eluded the mainstream by tampering with the phone system, frequenting the rave scene and shouting at anyone smoking anywhere near him. 'Once tolerated, even embraced, for his eccentricities, Mr. Draper now lives on the margins of this affluent world, still striving to carve out a role in the business mainstream,' says the WSJ. More from the article: 'Contemporaries who've gone on to riches and fame say they've tried to help Mr. Draper over the years. Mr. Wozniak says Mr. Draper's problem is that his skills lie in technology rather in making business deals or starting a company. "He didn't come from a business orientation," says Mr. Wozniak.'"

Comments

Re:Much more in Secret History of Hacking document

[jcr]

If you don't like it, don't toss out such obvious straight lines.

-jcr

Re:Wow

[somersault]

[*massive offtopic rant*]

I worry sometimes that I'm being an obnoxious brat in hindsight, and I never went to those parties, etc etc. Funnily enough I'm not usually interested in organised sports either, but mostly because teams these days don't even tend to use players from their own country, let alone their own town. I know it's going offtopic, but anyway: I first started disliking football because some people actually physically assault, and I'm sure have killed (though maybe not since the 80s or 90s) people who support the 'wrong' team (I live in the UK where people take their 'soccer' pretty seriously). Combined with the fact that I'm not great at football or other sports that involve tackling (I tend to just hurt the person rather than get the ball! not that I lack co-ordination, I'm not half bad at Counter-Strike ;) ). In my opinion supporting a team would mean a lot more if the team actually only used local players rather than just buying in all their talent. That's probably the reason that I actually enjoy international football, where I can support my own country (well, on the odd occasion that they get through qualifying! I'm Scottish). Supporting a team because they have a lot of money seems rather sad to me, kind of like supporting Microsoft just because they can afford to pay good wages.

Anyway, rant over, and I do agree with you on all your points. I know that I'm a very capable person when it comes to academic exercises, but when it comes to organising my life and interacting with people, I do tend to suck. I have been trying to be more social since I went through University, but sadly that has meant that I stopped doing coding in my spare time, and I feel I am not reaching my full geek potential. I'm currently an IT 'manager' but I'd probably feel a lot more fulfilled if I was working for some small but innovative games company. If I'd been born 10 years earlier I probably would be doing that, but these days people I feel people are used to highly polished games worked on by massive developement teams, whereas I've got that 'sort of elitism' that you mention, and like to be able to do everything myself. Of course having worked for a couple of years now I see that I probably would enjoy working as part of a team of coders, though I read that you hardly get paid anything as a games developer, and I'm making a pretty comfortable living right now. Meh. Less time with the gf, more time coding little shareware/freeware games? I think I'm either too burned out from other crap or maybe just to lazy to get back into coding in my spare time. In the time it took to write this comment I could have gone and reinstalled Visual C++ and got back into doing OpenGL tutorials or something :p *wonders if anyone else was sad enough to read this*

Re:Wow

[cowscows]

I was there too in terms of social awkwardness, pretty bad up until college, where I started to figure some of it out. I'm not that much of a social guy now though. I don't much care for parties, I don't like crowds all that much. I find that interacting with large groups of people is exhausting work. But for other people, my mom for example, they find crowds to be incredibly energizing, and can't stand sitting by themselves and doing something quiet.

But the thing that I finally realized is that neither way is better than the other, just that one of those ways is better for me personally. The world is full of both kinds, and needs both kinds. And because of that, there are times when I'm going to have to deal with the opposite kind. So I've given it a go, and I've learned how to deal with a lot of it. Where I can fit in with it, what my limitations are. I can go out to a restaurant and sit at a table with 30 other people and be fine, because the fact that we're eating means I have something else to do, which helps me keep my mind focused, instead of thinking about how loud it is in the restaurant. But if those same 30 people and I were all standing around at a cocktail party just chatting, I feel pretty out of place. I guess I'm just more of a task oriented person.

Anyways, back to the sports issue, I can agree with a lot of what you said. Professional sports are generally becoming less and less about the game and more about the money, which is uninspiring at best. But that doesn't explain the irrational hatred of sports in general that I commonly saw among much of the geek crowd. I think it's along the same lines of some of the social aspects for some of those people, "these things are hard for me, so they're obviously bad." That's a bad attitude for anyone to have about anything.