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View Full Version : John Draper (Captain Crunch), must listen



778 neighbour of some guy
29th October 2014, 10:31
You can listen to the whole interview or for the best part from minute 27.

Who is John Draper ( Captain Crunch)

•Mr. Draper developed one of the first word-processing programs as well as the technology that made possible voice-activated telephone menus.
•Mr. Draper is well known in the computer world. “He was the king of the nerds,” says Allan Lundell, who runs an independent film company and has chronicled the evolution of Silicon Valley.


•Draper learned how to make free calls by imitating the tones used by the phone company. He learned from other “phone phreaks” — as the hackers called themselves — including blind teenagers with near-perfect pitch.

Mr. Draper learned that a toy whistle found in a cereal box would also imitate the required tones, earning him the nickname Cap’n Crunch.The point was not just to make free calls but to explore and learn from the phone company’s rich and complicated system. On one occasion, Mr. Draper says he learned the code word needed to speak with the president — “Olympus” — and got through to someone on a secure line he thought was President Nixon. Mr. Draper says he told the man about a toilet-paper shortage in Los Angeles.

•The Esquire article also caught the attention of Steve Wozniak, an eventual Apple co-founder, who invited Mr. Draper to his dorm room at the University of California at Berkeley. When Mr. Draper appeared that evening, Mr. Wozniak, then 21, was taken aback by his guest’s appearance and odor, Mr. Wozniak wrote in his recent autobiography. “Are you Cap’n Crunch?” Mr. Wozniak asked in disbelief, according to the book. “I am he,” Mr. Draper responded as he strode into the room. Mr. Draper showed Mr. Wozniak and a friend, Mr. Jobs, how to build a device that could produce telephone tones. The pair turned the knowledge into a small business on the Berkeley campus, their first collaboration before founding Apple a few years later.

Mr. Wozniak employed Mr. Draper at Apple, where as a contractor in 1977 he designed a device that could immediately identify phone signals and lines — such as ones that made free calls — something modems were not able to do for a decade. The technology would later be used for tone-activated calling menus, voice mail and other purposes.

•Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1978. 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.


John Draper about what the government has planned for the Internet and what we can do to prepare.

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