John Draper: Captain Crunch, Blue Boxes and Apple II Code

Before there were computer hackers, there were phone phreaks, and the most famous of them got his name from a breakfast cereal.

John Draper discovered that a toy whistle packed in boxes of Cap'n Crunch blew the exact tone that AT&T's long-distance network used to talk to itself. With it, and the electronic "blue box" he built to replace it, he could route calls around the world for free, and he taught two kids named Wozniak and Jobs how to do it too.

The phone company and the FBI were less amused. Draper went to prison more than once, and he came out of it with the first word processor for the Apple II, written on paper in a jail cell.

John Draper at a Glance

• Born in 1943, Draper served in the US Air Force from 1964 to 1968 and was already helping fellow airmen make free calls through a base switchboard in Alaska.
• In 1969 a blind teenager named Denny Teresi told him about the Cap'n Crunch whistle, which blew a 2600-hertz tone that told AT&T's long-distance trunks they were idle.
• Ron Rosenbaum's October 1971 Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" made "Captain Crunch" a counterculture legend and sent Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs looking for him.
• Arrested in 1972, he got probation. In 1976 he was convicted of toll fraud again and spent four months at the federal prison in Lompoc, California.
• On a work-furlough sentence in 1979 he wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, which IBM shipped with its first PC in 1981.
• He designed a phone-dialing card at Apple that the company killed for being too much like a blue box, worked at Autodesk, drifted, and coded websites in Goa for a stretch in 1999.
• In 2001 he launched a security startup, ShopIP, and its OpenBSD-based CrunchBox firewall, with Wozniak's blessing.
• In 2017 BuzzFeed News reported allegations of unwanted contact at hacker conferences; Draper denied any sexual intent, and several conferences barred him.
• Now 83, he published his autobiography Beyond the Little Blue Box in 2018 and still writes a newsletter for his fans.

The Life of John Draper

Draper's Air Force Years

John Thomas Draper was born on March 11, 1943. As a kid he built a home radio station out of discarded military parts, and in 1964 he enlisted in the US Air Force, where he was posted to Alaska and found a switchboard that'd let homesick airmen call home for free.

At Charleston Air Force Station in Maine he ran a pirate radio station. He left the service in 1968 with an honorable discharge and a taste for making telephone and radio equipment do things it wasn't supposed to.

Back in California he studied at a community college and worked for Call Computer, a tiny time-sharing company in Mountain View whose owner noticed that Draper had a flair for programming.

The Whistle

In 1969, Denny Teresi, a blind teenager who ran his own pirate radio station, introduced Draper to phone phreaking. The phreaks had learned that AT&T's long-distance network signaled an idle trunk line with a 2600-hertz tone, and that a toy whistle from boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal blew exactly that pitch.

Half as Interesting: How a Cereal Box Toy Hacked AT&T's Phone Lines

Six minutes on why a 2600-hertz whistle could seize a long-distance trunk, how the blue box did the same job electronically and what AT&T did about it. The clearest short explainer of the trick Draper made famous, at 1.6 million views.

Whistle into a receiver after dialing a toll-free number, and the trunk thought the call had ended while the line stayed open. From there you could route your own calls anywhere, for nothing. Draper built blue boxes, electronic tone generators that did the job more reliably, and became the scene's resident engineer.

Then Ron Rosenbaum found him. The October 1971 Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" introduced America to a small group of telephone hobbyists who could control the network, including a man called Captain Crunch. It also introduced him to the FBI.

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It Is I

Two readers who devoured the article were a Berkeley student named Steve Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs. They spent weeks tracking Draper down, and when he finally arrived at Wozniak's dorm room, in moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, he announced himself with a flourish: "It is I."

Draper tutored the pair in building blue boxes, and they sold them door to door on the Berkeley campus, several years before they founded Apple.

Draper's own luck ran the other way. In May 1972 he was charged with wire fraud over free calls, and after a short stint in jail he was sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to keep his blue box knowledge to himself.

Lompoc and the Jail-Cell Word Processor

He didn't keep it to himself. He was a regular at the potluck dinners of the People's Computer Company in Menlo Park, and it was at a pay phone across the street that a government informer caught him in the act again.

Draper served from October 1976 to February 1977 at the federal prison in Lompoc, California, then finished the sentence in a work-release program in the Bay Area. Another conviction in Pennsylvania followed in 1978, and a beating there left him with a permanently injured back.

Captain Crunch in 1978: A Rare Interview at Muppet Headquarters

Shot on April 2, 1978, in the Henson Associates conference room at Muppet headquarters, Draper demos a $1,500 color graphics computer and an Apple auto-dialer loaded from cassette, and talks about the phone company trouble that landed him in jail. The other two tapes went missing.

Prison gave him his best idea. On a work furlough in 1979, he spent his days on an Apple II and his nights in the Alameda County jail with a printout, debugging on paper.

"It forced me to get off the computer and think," he told the New York Times. The result was EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II.

When IBM needed a word processor for its first PC in 1981, EasyWriter was the one in the box, ahead of anything from Microsoft. For a while Draper was a millionaire with a house in Hawaii.

Apple, Autodesk and the Road

Wozniak had brought Draper into Apple as a contractor when the company had about 15 employees. His project, a telephone interface card for the Apple II, could dial numbers and generate touch tones; Apple's president killed it on sight, worried it was a computer-controlled blue box.

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The decades that followed were a scramble. He programmed video drivers at Autodesk, and a 1987 charge over forged BART transit tickets ended in a misdemeanor plea and a diversion program. He lost jobs, was homeless more than once, and was robbed on a Texas highway of the laptop holding the only copy of his autobiography.

By 1999 he was a self-described high-tech hobo, spending six months on the Goa coast of India coding websites for a local entrepreneur.

Captain Crunch, White Hat

In 2001, at 57, Draper reinvented himself as a security consultant. With a small group of partners he founded ShopIP, and in 2002 it unveiled CrunchBox, a firewall and intrusion detection appliance built on OpenBSD with Wozniak's public endorsement.

"I'm not a bad guy," he said at the time. "But I'm being treated like a fox trying to guard the hen house."

The product never took off, and a later stint as chief technology officer of a media startup, En2go, ended the same way. But the legend only grew. He was played in Pirates of Silicon Valley, written into Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, and became a fixture at hacker conferences, where young attendees lined up to meet him.

Draper Tells His Own Captain Crunch History at Vintage Computing Berlin

An hour of Draper on stage at the 2015 Vintage Computing Festival Berlin, recorded by the Chaos Computer Club, telling the Captain Crunch story in his own words, from the whistle to Woz and Jobs and beyond.

The Allegations

That standing collapsed in 2017, when BuzzFeed News published accounts from men who said Draper had initiated unwanted contact during what he called "energy workouts" at conferences in the late 1990s and 2000s. DEF CON, HOPE and other events barred him.

Draper denied any sexual intent, describing the exercises as an applied kinesiology routine he'd been taught in 1990. "I apologize if my exercise program caused anyone to feel uncomfortable in any way," he told the Daily Dot. "That was never my intention."

In 2018 he published his autobiography, Beyond the Little Blue Box, written with C. Wilson Fraser and with a foreword by Wozniak. Today, at 83, he keeps a website with a monthly newsletter, a Patreon and a lot of ham radio.

Beyond the Little Blue Box: Draper's Own Story, Foreword by Wozniak

• Draper's 2018 autobiography, written with C. Wilson Fraser and introduced by Steve Wozniak: the whistle, Lompoc, EasyWriter and the decades of drift, in his own voice.

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John Draper: The Whistle That Started It All

Phone phreaking was hacking before the word existed: the same curiosity, the same thrill of making a vast machine obey, the same collision with the law. Draper was its most visible face, and for better and worse, his life has had all of it.

He's still here, still tinkering, still Captain Crunch, and still happy to tell the story of a toy whistle to anyone who asks.

The cereal company stopped putting the whistle in the box decades ago. The whistle never quite disappeared from hacking history.