free international calls

This makes me laugh: long live childlike curiosity that defies corporate greed.

In the 1960s, a kid playing with a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal made an odd discovery. The whistle produced a 2600-hertz tone, the same sound used by AT&T to control its phone network. That unlocked a loophole in the system, allowing them to hack into AT&T and get free long distance calls.

When pranksters and tech-savvy youth discovered this, they learned they could mimic the signal, tricking the network into granting free international calls. These early experimenters, dubbed “phone phreaks,” laid the groundwork for what would later become modern hacking culture.

The most famous of them, John Draper (nicknamed “Captain Crunch”) built electronic devices called “blue boxes” that reproduced the whistle’s tone with precision. Even a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were captivated by the trick, selling their own blue boxes at college before founding Apple. What began as childlike curiosity revealed the fragility of the world’s largest communications system and marked the dawn of digital rebellion.

Added Fact: The 2600 Hz tone became so iconic that a hacker magazine, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, was later named in its honor.

via {fb}