
John "Captain Crunch" Draper, the Hacker's Hacker - raganwald
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/John_Draper
======
calloc
I met John Draper at SCALE 5x, eventually a huge group of us went out to
dinner at some asian restaurant with him. He was talking about some new anti-
spam venture he was starting up and how he would love for us (I was a student
at the time) to help him start up his company and sort spam.

All we would have to do (without monetary compensation) would be see if an
email was spam and file it as such, and then he would sell the data we were
generating to other companies that could then provide actual anti-spam
solutions based on human interpretation of messages rather than just computer
checked.

Overall I didn't like him. It smelled like he hadn't showered in at least a
couple of days, and he was making rude sexual comments regarding the wait
staff, overall my gut feeling was to get away from him as he was nothing good.

Here was someone who was a hero to so many people making an absolute fool out
of himself and presenting himself as someone who has no social skills what so
ever.

When I saw him at DefCon 17 it didn't seem like he had changed much, a friend
of mine said she went up to him to just talk to him, seeing as how he is a
legend, and all he did was make rude comments regarding taking her upstairs to
his room and whatnot and she just turned around and walked away disgusted.

It is pretty cool he is still out there working on various projects, but
overall he could use an overhaul on his social skills and learn that when you
gain some sort of status in a community you have to act appropriately.
Ultimately while John Draper used to be one of the guys I looked up to as
having done some really awesome things I was saddened in how he acted in
public.

~~~
bh42
I've never met him person, but from the videos I've seen it is pretty obvious
the man is pretty far on the aspie spectrum.

Perhaps with massive intervention early on he could have learned to be almost
normal. But at his age, I think we should all keep in mind that as much as he
is a geek stereotype we're all trying to overcome, and as much as people like
him can be dicks and sexists, and hurt others, it is not easy being him.

This does not excuse his behavior. I think his work is worth of admiration and
his social skills of, not scorn, but pity.

------
raganwald
At times like this I'm deeply saddened. Nobody is doing anything _wrong_ , but
yet... Focusing on Draper's awful social presence at the expense of discussing
what he actually did or didn't do during his heyday... Seems so very un-hacker
to me. I feel like we killed the farmer, took over the farm, but we're the
pigs saying that all hackers are equal, but some hackers are more equal than
others.

Why? Because we seem to be saying that getting along with others is more
important than hacking. Of course it is when it comes to making friends,
finding love, selling a dream, building companies, and almost everything we do
as humans.

But yet... Hacking is somehow not one of those things to me.

Obviously the man should not get a free pass for unacceptable behaviour--I
have unbearably strong views about certain programming personalities who
express racist, sexist and other views I find abhorrent--but I wish that his
social misbehaviour was a footnote and his hacking was front and center.

For whatever reason, discussion of what he did or didn't do is attracting way
less attention than discussion of his personal life.

Oh, well. Too late to delete the submission.

(If I'd thought that we are going to end up talking about full body massages
and whether having a shower makes it acceptable to invite a stranger to your
room at a computer conference... I'd have judged it as being "Not Hacker
News.")

~~~
calloc
The reason I bring it up is that while we as hackers may choose to only look
at the accomplishments of someone as a hacker it is how they are perceived
socially that matters to the rest of the world.

As a hacker I also understand that social skills comes with the field. If I
want to become someone in the world and I want to present then I have to have
some hygiene, I've gotta be socially presentable. It is not acceptable for me
to walk around in a banana hammock covered in dirt and grime and then expect
people to still look up at me.

There are two types of hacking, and they go hand in hand, hacking in the sense
of accomplishing something great (whether that be technological, code wise, or
anything along those lines) and social hacking. Any well adjusted hacker knows
how to balance the two to make society believe he is a productive member and
can be related to, yet at the same time bending the rules that society has set
forth to do great things!

~~~
raganwald
1\. Nothing in what you say here or elsewhere is factually incorrect.

2\. I agree that it's appropriate to give people information so that they do
not find themselves in a situation not to their liking.

------
iuguy
I met John at Hackers At Large in a field in the eastern Netherlands. The
group I was with spent a fair bit of time with him, had some good chat and I
thought he was alright at the time. I think his grip on reality wasn't that
great, but to be fair at the time god only knows what people might have given
him. Two days in someone asked him about Jobs and Woz, he said he thought Woz
was a nice kid but he didn't really get on with Jobs. I didn't know he
actually worked at Apple for a while though.

For the comments about him being creepy, fair enough. My experience of him in
Holland was that he was definitely not the type of guy you introduce to your
mother, and that he had social issues, but lots of people do. As for the
comments on hygiene, wake up - we live in a world where people like Richard
Stallman pick bits from their toe and eat it in the middle of conferences,
don't judge an old man because he smells funny. Maybe one day you'll be a
funny smelling old man/girl.

~~~
marquis
I may have been at the same conf as you, I met John there also while I was
hanging out a good friend of his. I found him cordial, humourous, engaging,
and not egotistical (though aware of his fame). It may depend on the time of
day you meet him, but he has a certain charm and I always remembered meeting
him with a fondness.

------
lylejohnson
> a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch
> cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 hertz... 2600: The Hacker
> Quarterly is named after this whistle frequency

Now I'm curious whether the Atari 2600 was also named after this. I've just
done a little bit of Googling but so far haven't come up with any hints on the
origin of the game console's name. Does anyone know?

~~~
M1573RMU74710N
IIRC it's because it's model designation was CX2600. They didn't use the 2600
designation originally (they called it the Atari VGS or something like that).I
think they started using it because like Pong, they planned to release various
versions of the system.

Whether the model number was a reference to that is hard to say. It's not like
they have much to do with eachother, and Atari had been naming their products
with C---- model numbers for years...but it's conceivable that someone said
"let's make it model 2600" with 2600hz in mind.

------
mpc
"Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1979.
According to The Wall Street Journal, he hand-wrote the code while serving
nights in the Alameda County Jail, then entered the code later into a
computer."

Amazing...

~~~
angrycoder
Still amazing, but the paragraph right after that gives more detail.

"Draper's personal website furnishes a more detailed version[1] of the coding
of EasyWriter. Draper was in prison, in California, at the time, but under a
'work furlough' program. This meant that while he had to spend every night in
prison, he spent each day working a regular job outside prison. This job was
at Receiving Studios, a small band practice studio, and while there he had
access to a computer, where he coded EasyWriter. He did take copies of the
code 'home' to prison overnight to work on it."

------
captaincrunch
Wow, I suppose I chose the wrong Hacker News user name...

~~~
X-Istence
Yeah ... definitely did; wait a minute, is that you John?

------
gxs
Wow, I hadn't heard his name in years.

Just like that you sent me back to '99. 8th grade, me, a 1337 hacker wannabe.
I used to subscribe to 2600 magazine.

As a side note, he got his name from the fact that he figured out that a toy
whistle in captain crunch cereal boxes produced the frequency he needed to
game the telephone system. I'm sure I didn't do the description justice, but
that is the gist of it.

------
kroc
An alternative view of Captain Crunch:
<http://www.osnews.com/story/20606/_Captain_Crunch_on_Apple> (see the snippet
from the Recollection article). Read the full recollection article, this is an
important read re: phreaking

------
abyssknight
I can now confirm that I've met Captain Crunch, or at least seen him in
person. We were at DEFCON 17 and a friend of mine was talking to him.
Apparently they had lunch together, and he's a really down-to-earth, fun guy.

~~~
ax0n
One thing, though... make sure you politely decline if he asks if you want to
do anything involving massages or exercise. Unless you're into having sex with
old men, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

~~~
joshhart
I take it there's some kind of story here?

~~~
ax0n
There's definitely a story here. I haven't experienced it myself. I met him a
loooong time ago, and he seemed as normal as anyone else at DefCon (back in
the late 1990s). But I've heard the stories, too, from multiple people.

~~~
david_shaw
For those looking for references to the "massage" stories, it's actually
pretty well documented in an old CNN story covering the HOPE conference a few
years ago:
[http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/paranoia.id...](http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/paranoia.idg/index.html)

Not to say that Capn Crunch didn't contribute greatly to the hacking/phone
phreaking scene, but now a days it seems like he's pretty much just a rude
creep.

Excerpt from the article:

"Script kiddies!" spits John Draper, 57. "Think they're hot (stuff)." The
grizzled veteran got his handle, Captain Crunch, in the early '70s, when he
discovered that a plastic whistle from a cereal box emitted a tone crucial to
phreaking. In 1978, Draper spent four months in jail for his illicit
proclivities and these days, tries to stay legit.

"You should try one of my body tune-ups," he says. "It's a great energy
boost." Indeed, he spends a good deal of the conference enticing young
attendees back to his hotel room, where he offers full-contact "stretching"
sessions. And the Captain seems to have absorbed the lesson of the "Selling
Out" talk all too well. "Did you get my URL?" he says. "ShopIP.com. It's
e-commerce for the rest of us!" _

------
jbellis
John Draper was in one of my SQLAlchemy tutorials at PyCon a couple years ago.
Very cool that he's still out there hacking.

