
Vintage 1960's Cap'N Crunch Bo'Son Whistle Blue Phone Phreaker - martindale
http://www.ebay.com/itm/361515681516
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bobsgame
One of my first electronics projects was modifying a Radio Shack tone dialer
into a "red box." It was too late for it to work on most payphones but I
actually got it to work one time in a Target lobby. Then I realized I didn't
really have anyone to call.

~~~
robk
I did the same thing in high school. The best I could figure out was to call
my dad at work which at least was considered "long distance" despite being
only 50 miles away. I do not miss the old Bell pricing model.

~~~
VLM
For the benefit of our foreign readers, most Americans thought our addressing
scheme was coincident with our billing scheme, but it definitely was not.

We addressed phones and routed calls via area codes, but billed based on LATA.
In practice if most of your calls were either across the country or across the
neighborhood it didn't matter, but in the last days of BBSes being popular due
to massive weirdness in the billing models it was often cheaper to call a BBS
across the country than to call a BBS in your LATA but outside the local area.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_are...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_area)

It had its strange charm as sort of a logic puzzle.

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johnorourke
Fantastic, a real piece of history! I had the pleasure of a long video chat
with "Cap'n Crunch" a while back... the guy has so many quality stories that I
sincerely hope he is busy writing an autobiography. I was a wee lad while all
the real phreaking fun went on but reading the stories in Hugo Cornwall's
"Hackers Handbook" (after it was un-banned by the local library) piqued my
interest and pretty soon I was trying to hook up my BBC Micro to an old 300
baud modem and connecting to an X25 PAD at the local university... fun times.
I mean f.......u........n........t.......i......+++ATH0 "damn!" re-dial....

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Mizza
Can whoever buys this please create a 3D scan? I don't have $400 to spend on a
tiny plastic toy, but I'd love to make one on a 3D printer!

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cenal
John Draper (Cap'N Crunch) has been very sick in recent years. I was following
his posts on Facebook till he removed himself from there. Here is an old
article about it:

[https://www.qikfunder.com/crowdfund/help-john-draper-
captain...](https://www.qikfunder.com/crowdfund/help-john-draper-captain-
crunch)

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madaxe_again
Some context, for anyone not familiar with Blue Boxes/phreaking:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box)

Prior to this, folks (Joybubbles etc.) would just whistle the 2600hz trunk
reset tone.

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chris_wot
Isn't the Blue Box what Wozniak was initially selling?

~~~
percept
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUf1d-GuK0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUf1d-GuK0Q)

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mavsman
Alright I think I've got this straight. Here's my best attempt at a summary
for this thing:

John Draper is/was a Phreaker aka a phone hacker. He discovered that this toy
(from a Cap'n Crunch cereal box) could be used to whistle into an old phone
and make free long distance phone calls. Because of that, he was given the
nickname Cap'n Crunch. He is now declining in health.

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mchahn
In the late 60's I wanted to call my girlfriend for free across the country
using tones. I looked up the phone company spec's in the college library.
After figuring out the tones needed I went into the EE lab and made a tape
recording of an audio oscillator. Then to make a call I played the tape into
the phone. Worked great.

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mchahn
I hope the person who bought this knew that it wouldn't make free phone calls
any more.

