Tag: Charlatan

The tl;dr cliffnotes: John Draper was not invent the Blue Box. In April of 2015, several years after Phil Lapsley published “Exploding the Phone” giving a detailed history of the early days of phreaking, I wrote a blog largely based on that book to clear up long-standing rumors and mistakes in a variety of publications. […]

The tl;dr cliffnotes: John Draper was not the first to discover that a Cap’n Crunch whistle could be used for phreaking. It is almost a ‘fact’ that John Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, discovered that a toy whistle in a box of cereal could be used to make free phone calls. I say ‘almost’ […]