
Early Hackers Used Whistles from Cap’n Crunch Cereal Boxes - rmason
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle
======
hestefisk
Interesting they didn’t mention that 2600 Magazine is named after the tone
frequency in the first blue box, 2600 Hz.

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rman666
This is news? Gawd I feel old.

~~~
zw123456
You and me both. Now days people send their kids off to college with a cell
phone. When I went off to college my Mom gave me a roll of quarters to use to
call home with. I used phone hacks instead and spent the quarters on beer :)
Back then a roll of quarters bought enough beers to get you pretty buzzed.

~~~
jaclaz
It sounds a lot like (JFYI):

[https://tinyapps.org/blog/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html](https://tinyapps.org/blog/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html)

~~~
zw123456
LOL, good ones, I guess I am an old guy :)

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latchkey
Sorry, it bugs me when I see this guy get written about. Please do not pass up
his sexual misconduct issues (mentioned in the article as well). He might be
an early legend, but I don't think he should be idolized any longer.

[https://hackaday.com/2017/12/01/we-need-to-have-a-chat-
about...](https://hackaday.com/2017/12/01/we-need-to-have-a-chat-about-
something-important/)

[https://www.csoonline.com/article/3237591/captain-crunch-
aka...](https://www.csoonline.com/article/3237591/captain-crunch-aka-john-
draper-banned-from-defcon-for-sexual-misconduct.html)

~~~
wkearney99
Yow. That's sad. Crunch is a mess. Arguably brilliant with some of the things
he's created, but the madness is a pretty high price to pay. Personally, I
could never get past his lack of basic hygiene. The back thing, though, prison
was not kind to Draper and left him with a lot of on-going pain.

I saw similarities with some of the folks Aaron Swartz associated with back in
the 90's. That jackass Winer, for one.

There's a lot of fragility in young minds, do them a favor and call out
against this festering abusive behavior. Otherwise they continue to get away
with it.

------
black-tea
They called themselves _phreakers_ , not hackers.

~~~
reaperducer
Yep. "Hackers" has changed definitions at least six times that I can think of.

And anything to do with the telephone network was "phreakers."

And "cypherpunks" wasn't always about encryption. It was about passwords.

Before the internet, and on the internet before the web, it was common for
hackers and casual sysops to create an account on a system with the username
"cypherpunk" and the password "cypherpunk" to let anyone in to explore. This
was very useful once data started getting siloed into pay services. If you
think paying $2/week for nytimes.com is bad, before the internet, you might
pay $60-$100 an hour in today's dollars to read a newspaper online.

There's a watered-down version of it happening right now with store checkout
systems where you enter a phone number to collect "points." I ran into it a
couple of years ago, and I'm surprised how many stores it works in. There's no
way I'm going to spill the beans on HN, because I enjoy collecting my gas
discounts through the collective help of this anonymous community.

~~~
dontbenebby
Reminds me of a Firefox extension I saw a while back that had hard coded
shared usernames/passwords for the various news sites that were "free" with a
registration (which also opted you into receiving spam)

------
bookofjoe
"Secrets of the Little Blue Box," Ron Rosenbaum's classic October 1971 Esquire
article: [https://classic.esquire.com/article/1971/10/1/secrets-of-
the...](https://classic.esquire.com/article/1971/10/1/secrets-of-the-blue-box)

~~~
bookofjoe
"The legendary Mark Bernay" featured in the Esquire article:

>The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out to Be “The Midnight Skulker” Mark Bernay.
I had come across that name before. It was on Gilbertson’s select list of
phone phreaks. The California phone phreaks had spoken of a mysterious Mark
Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the West Coast. And in
fact almost every phone phreak in the West can trace his origins either
directly to Mark Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay.

It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for
himself ) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in
phone books all along his way. The stickers read something like “Want to hear
an interesting tape recording? Call these numbers.” The numbers that followed
were toll-free loop-around pairs. When one of the curious called one of the
numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop by Bernay
which explained the use of looparound pairs, gave the numbers of several more,
and ended by telling the caller, “At six o’clock tonight this recording will
stop and you and your friends can try it out. Have fun.”

“I was disappointed by the response at first,” Bernay told me, when I finally
reached him at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the usual “I
never do anything illegal” formalities with which experienced phone phreaks
open most conversations. “I went all over the coast with these stickers not
only on pay phones, but I’d throw them in front of high schools in the middle
of the night, I’d leave them unobtrusively in candy stores, scatter them on
main streets of small towns. At first hardly anyone bothered to try it out. I
would listen in for hours and hours after six o’clock and no one came on. I
couldn’t figure out why people wouldn’t be interested. Finally these two girls
in Oregon tried it out and told all their friends and suddenly it began to
spread.”

Before his Johnny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable group
of early pre-blue-box phone phreaks together on loop-arounds in Los Angeles.
Bernay does not claim credit for the original discovery of the loop-around
numbers. He attributes the discovery to an eighteen-vear-old reform-school kid
in Long Beach whose name he forgets and who, he says, “just disappeared one
day.” When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds independently, from clues in
his readings in old issues of the Automatic Electric Technical Journal, he
found dozens of the reform-school kid’s friends already using them. However,
it was one of Bernay’s disciples in Seattle that introduced phone phreaking to
blind kids. The Seattle kid who learned about loops through Bernay’s recording
told a blind friend, the blind kid taught the secret to his friends at a
winter camp for blind kids in Los Angeles. When the camp session was over
these kids took the secret back to towns all over the West. This is how the
original blind kids became phone phreaks. For them, for most phone phreaks in
general, it was the discovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds which led
them on to far more serious and sophisticated phonephreak methods, and which
gave them a medium for sharing their discoveries.

A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique to a blind
kids’ summer camp in Vermont, which spread it along the East Coast. All from a
Mark Bernay sticker.

Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got his start when he was fifteen
and his family moved into an L.A. suburb serviced by General Telephone and
Electronics equipment. He became fascinated with the differences between Bell
and G.T.&E. equipment. He learned he could make interesting things happen by
carefully timed clicks with the disengage button. He learned to interpret
subtle differences in the array of clicks, whirrs and kachinks he could hear
on his lines. He learned he could shift himself around the switching relays of
the L.A. area code in a not-too-predictable fashion by interspersing his own
hook-switch clicks with the clicks within the line. (Independent phone
companies—there are nineteen hundred of them still left, most of them tiny
island principalities in Ma Bell’s vast empire—have always been favorites with
phone phreaks, first as learning tools, then as Archimedes platforms from
which to manipulate the huge Bell system. A phone phreak in Bell territory
will often M-F himself into an independent’s switching system, with switching
idiosyncrasies which can give him marvelous leverage over the Bell System.

“I have a real affection for Automatic Electric equipment,” Bernay told me.
“There are a lot of things you can play with. Things break down in interesting
ways.”

Shortly after Bernay graduated from college (with a double major in chemistry
and philosophy), he graduated from phreaking around with G.T.&E. to the Bell
System itself, and made his legendary sticker-pasting journey north along the
coast, settling finally in Northwest Pacific Bell territory. He discovered
that if Bell does not break down as interestingly as G.T.&E., it nevertheless
offers a lot of “things to play with.”

Bernay learned to play with blue boxes. He established his own personal
switchboard and phone-phreak research laboratory complex. He continued his
phone-phreak evangelism with ongoing sticker campaigns. He set up two
recording numbers, one with instructions for beginning phone phreaks, the
other with latest news and technical developments (along with some advanced
instruction) gathered from sources all over the country.

These days, Bernay told me, he had gone beyond phone-phreaking itself. “Lately
I’ve been enjoying playing with computers more than playing with phones. My
personal thing in computers is just like with phones, I guess —the kick is in
finding out how to beat the system, how to get at things I’m not supposed to
know about, how to do things with the system that I’m not supposed to be able
to do.”

As a matter of fact, Bernay told me, he had just been fired from his computer-
programming job for doing things he was not supposed to be able to do. He had
been working with a huge timesharing computer owned by a large corporation but
shared by many others. Access to the computer was limited to those programmers
and corporations that had been assigned certain passwords. And each password
restricted its user to access to only the one section of the computer cordoned
off from its own information storager. The password system prevented companies
and individuals from stealing each other’s information.

“I figured out how to write a program that would let me read everyone else’s
password,” Bernay reports. “I began playing around with passwords. I began
letting the people who used the computer know, in subtle ways, that I knew
their passwords. I began dropping notes to the computer supervisors with hints
that I knew what I know. I signed them ‘The Midnight Skulker.’ I kept getting
cleverer and cleverer with my messages and devising ways of showing them what
I could do. I’m sure they couldn’t imagine I could do the things I was showing
them. But they never responded to me. Every once in a while they’d change the
passwords, but I found out how to discover what the new ones were, and I let
them know. But they never responded directly to The Midnight Skulker. I even
finally designed a program which they could use to prevent my program from
finding out what it did. In effect I told them how to wipe me out, The
Midnight Skulker. It was a very clever program. I started leaving clues about
myself. I wanted them to try and use it and then try to come up with something
to get around that and reappear again. But they wouldn’t play. I wanted to get
caught. I mean I didn’t want to get caught personally, but I wanted them to
notice me and admit that they noticed me. I wanted them to attempt to respond,
maybe in some interesting way.”

Finally the computer managers became concerned enough about the threat of
information-stealing to respond. However, instead of using The Midnight
Skulker’s own elegant self-destruct program, they called in their security
personnel, interrogated everyone, found an informer to identify Bernay as The
Midnight Skulker, and fired him.

“At first the security people advised the company to hire me full-time to
search out other flaws and discover other computer freaks. I might have liked
that. But I probably would have turned into a double double agent rather than
the double agent they wanted. I might have resurrected The Midnight Skulker
and tried to catch myself. Who knows? Anyway, the higher-ups turned the whole
idea down.”

IRL is Richard Kashdan, now 74
([https://www.facebook.com/PhoneTrips](https://www.facebook.com/PhoneTrips)),
who lives in San Francisco and from time to time sends me items of interest
for my blog.

------
luxpir
Timely reminder. UK are shutting down fixed/pstn lines as of 2025 so this is
the end of the road if any hacks still exist in the wild.

Can get a small bit of that feeling of communicating for 'free' across vast
distances with amateur radio.

Edit:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/openreach_consults_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/openreach_consults_on_how_to_shift_16_million_phone_lines_to_voip_by_2025/)

~~~
chx
That's interesting, I thought ADSL is piggybacking on that infra...?

~~~
detaro
On a physical layer, yes: ADSL runs over the same copper lines. But the upper
layers are quite separated. Moving everyone to VoIP means less infrastructure
needed, things working the same for fiber and ADSL customers, and higher
speeds for ADSL (due to being able to use the frequency bands reserved for
phone service for data too). This has been a general trend in countries that
are using ADSL a lot, e.g. here in Germany plain analogue and ISDN service has
been reduced more and more too.

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0898
I don't know if this works outside the UK, but last year BBC Radio 4 did a
wonderful documentary on Joybubbles – one of the first phreakers. Great way to
spend 28 minutes.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hlnjq](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hlnjq)

~~~
njepa
'Stories and stuff' us apparently available at
[http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/storiesandstuff/](http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/storiesandstuff/)

------
plapsley
If you are interested in this stuff, here's a somewhat shameless plug for my
book: Exploding The Phone, which is a deep dive into the history of phone
hacking from 1950 to the mid-1980s.
[http://explodingthephone.com/](http://explodingthephone.com/)

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stuaxo
Rumour has it there was a guy in the UK who could sing the tones.

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mr_toad
[https://www.2600.com](https://www.2600.com)

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ryanthedev
I love this! Makes me remember the nights I spent lerking online for og
hacking info.

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waffleguy
I think someone just saw/read Pirates of Silicon Valley or Ready Player One

~~~
sanxiyn
Yeah I think Ready Player One made good use of this lore.

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jslakro
-_-

