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Captain Crunch (and Steve Wozniak) Write New Book: 'Beyond the Little Blue Box' (kickstarter.com)
Slashdot reader blottsie shares a new article about the legendary Captain Crunch -- which includes Steve Wozniak's memory that Steve Jobs "started avoiding Crunch...afraid that it would put us too close to getting arrested." The Daily Dot reports:
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. Now, for the first time, Draper is looking to publish his story with Beyond the Little Blue Box, an autobiography for which he's about to launch a Kickstarter campaign...
[H]e anonymously called in a national emergency directly to a furious President Richard Nixon on the Oval Office phone line, reporting that the West Coast had run out of toilet paper. He also claims he once bypassed the Iron Curtain to call Moscow in the Soviet Union. There's a playful mischief about him, but he's serious when it comes to his craft, relaying technical, intricate details about the systems he worked to hack... For many tinkering young coders and internet activists, Draper is still considered a folk hero, one whose apolitical infatuation with complex systems and compulsion to expose their limits made him a target -- especially where that curiosity crossed with corporate interests.
"Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas," Steve Jobs said in a 1994 interview. "The power of understanding that if you could build this box, you could control hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, that's a powerful thing." Steve Wozniak -- who writes the book's foreword -- remembers how Jobs ended that interview. "Steve Jobs said -- and I agree -- that without the blue box there might never have been an Apple."
Draper's Kickstarter campaign includes a "2600 Club" Bronze level, while people who pledge over $199 will receive an actual blue anonabox. And there's also a $10,000 "Super Phreak" level which includes a "VIP one-to-one meeting" with 74-year-old John Draper himself.
[H]e anonymously called in a national emergency directly to a furious President Richard Nixon on the Oval Office phone line, reporting that the West Coast had run out of toilet paper. He also claims he once bypassed the Iron Curtain to call Moscow in the Soviet Union. There's a playful mischief about him, but he's serious when it comes to his craft, relaying technical, intricate details about the systems he worked to hack... For many tinkering young coders and internet activists, Draper is still considered a folk hero, one whose apolitical infatuation with complex systems and compulsion to expose their limits made him a target -- especially where that curiosity crossed with corporate interests.
"Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas," Steve Jobs said in a 1994 interview. "The power of understanding that if you could build this box, you could control hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, that's a powerful thing." Steve Wozniak -- who writes the book's foreword -- remembers how Jobs ended that interview. "Steve Jobs said -- and I agree -- that without the blue box there might never have been an Apple."
Draper's Kickstarter campaign includes a "2600 Club" Bronze level, while people who pledge over $199 will receive an actual blue anonabox. And there's also a $10,000 "Super Phreak" level which includes a "VIP one-to-one meeting" with 74-year-old John Draper himself.
Not really.
Before the Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" came out, blue boxes were really just known among phreaks. When the article came out, it exploded.
Jobs read the article, and got Woz to design a digital blue box. And sell it. (Woz the engineer, Jobs the salesman). This was all prior to Apple. Woz's blue box was considered among many to be the finest - it didn't require tuning (most blue boxes were using analog contraptions and part tolerances weren't good, so many had tuning functions to trim the frequencies in)(, and it's digital (or rather, using digital ICs and not computerized) made for a very accurate box.
But this was officially the first Jobs+Woz collaboration, Woz made them, Jobs sold them, and they made decent coin from it. Enough that Jobs decided to start Apple with Woz.
Chances are, Jobs and Woz would've started Apple anyways (they've worked together before and were good friends), but Draper and his blue box got them to actually make money selling a product.and proved that Jobs and Woz could together work and make money.
Fun fact - every blue box came with a warranty from Woz - in the form of a paper slip inside that guaranteed Woz will fix anything that broke, valid as long as the slip was there. Woz removed the slip from warranty serviced boxes, of course. And those boxes with the slip inside them are worth some major money today. And Woz has stated that yes, he'll still honor the warranty.
Final anecdote - Woz and Jobs were stranded after Woz's VW bus broke down. They went to the nearest phone booth and was trying to call for assistance (using their blue box, of course, they barely had money for the phone call), when cops came around. They took the box, and asked what it was. Woz said it was a music box, you push buttons and it makes sounds. Cop responds it needs tuning, and that someone named Moog already created one a few years earlier. (Yes, the original Moog synthesizer)
Now, I don't know if Draper, Jobs and Woz actually knew of each other's existence at the time - Jobs read the article and convinced Woz to make the box.
Personally, I'm fascinated by this stuff.
The Evan Doorbell tapes offer quite a treasure trove of stories, techniques, and sounds from those days.
The Esquire article probably did more harm to phreaking than anything else, IMO. Captain Crunch made a bold claim that three phreakers with blue boxes could take down the Bell System by stacking connections. Among the Evan Doorbell tapes, there are some examples of how stacking worked, and its limitations. Only a few two-wire tandem switches were actually stackable; the four-wire switches that handled the lion's share of long-distance traffic were not. Also, each extra link added also increased the noise floor to the point that signalling tones could only go so far. Evan Doorbell, in his own discussion of stacking, said that about 24 links or so was the most he could count on any of his tapes of stacks.
Crunch's hypothetical "three phreakers" might have been able to busy out a few minor trunk groups, but take down the Bell System? Not likely. Nonetheless, claims like that had to light a fire under the security department's butts.
Though it didn't come out until decades later, AT&T was no stranger to mass surveillance; their Project Greenstar system, deployed in 1964, which was meant to catch phreakers committing toll fraud. It monitored random trunks for out-of-place occurrences of 2600 Hz, and would then start recording the call in question. Ma Bell was concerned enough about its legality that it was kept top secret and never mentioned in phone fraud trials.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!