More
than Free Phone Calls
The underground world of phreaking came
to the general public's attention in a 1971 article in Esquire magazine.
The article outlined the methods by which a small, but growing, group of
individuals were outsmarting America's telephone systems in order to make
free phone calls around the globe.
Phreaking is a term created by a play on
the words freak, phone and free. The fad began when Bell switched from
human operators to a computer managed phone system. The new direct-dial
system was based on multi-frequency tones. As legend has it, a blind boy
who had a gift for perfect pitch whistled a 2600-cycle tone while speaking
to his grandmother on the phone and caused the line to be disconnected.
He soon discovered that he could then dial (or whistle) another number,
as his local office had never received the 'hang-up' notice of the 2600-cycle
tone, without incurring further long-distance charges. Soon a legion of
young boys were passing around the new trick. [4]
However, the importance of the phreaking
movement to the development of hacking in general is that a subculture
with anti-establishment virtues soon grew around the practice. The icon
of counter-culture, Abbie Hoffman spread the word about phreaking in his
newsletter Youth International Party Line. [5]
"Ma'Bell", as the phone company was referred to, was a favorite target.
Ripping off the phone company became a protest for the liberation of technology.
Captain
Crunch
A.K.A. John Draper, Captain Crunch became
the idol of phreakers. His handle, another element of phreaking culture
which would become common among future computer hackers, was derived from
his use of a whistle found in Cap'n Crunch cereal which emitted
a 2600-cycle tone.
Draper took phreaking to another level.
The focus of his work was not attempting to obtain free phone calls, but
rather to access and manipulate the computer system which lay behind the
phone to place even more complex calls with each new attempt, sending calls
around the world, bouncing them off satellites only to ask a passerby at
Victoria station how the weather was that morning.
His legendary status has meant that Draper
is often the focus of hacking attempts to this day. [6]
From Phreakers
to Hackers
Some of the most influential early hackers
and software/hardware developers started off as phreakers. In 1975, the
first personal computer the Altair 8800 was formally launched. It's capacities
were limited because it lacked software but it incited the creation of
the Homebrew Computer Club in California. Two members of the club had already
made a name for themselves as manufacturers of 'blue boxes' (devices which
emitted the necessary tones for phreaking). Their handles were Berkeley
Blue (Steve Jobs) and Oak Toebark (Steve Wozniak), the founders of Apple
computers. [7]
