John Thomas Draper (also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch, or Crunchman; born March 11, 1943) is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a widely known figure within the hacker and computer security community. He is primarily known as a colorful and unconventional figure in Silicon Valley history and lore. He befriended and influenced Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the years before they founded Apple Computer. His determined probing and exploration of the telephone network earned him a reputation for his technical acumen. However, his activities sometimes crossed legal lines, leading to criminal charges and prison time for toll fraud.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked as a software engineer for Apple and Autodesk and briefly ran his own software company, producing the EasyWriter word processor. He later worked on computer security and media-delivery technologies, serving as chief technical officer of ShopIP from 1999 to 2004 and becoming chief technical officer of En2go in 2007.
Early life Draper is the son of a United States Air Force engineer. As a child, he built a home radio station from discarded military components. He was frequently bullied in school and briefly received psychological treatment.
Draper enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1964. While stationed in Alaska, he helped his fellow service members make free phone calls home by devising access to a local telephone switchboard. In 1967, while stationed at Charleston Air Force Station in Maine, he created WKOS (W-"chaos"), a pirate radio station based in nearby Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.
Following his honorable discharge from the Air Force as an airman first class in 1968, he moved to San Jose, California. He worked briefly for National Semiconductor as an engineering technician and at Hugle International, where he worked on early designs for a cordless telephone. He also attended De Anza College part-time through 1972. During this period, he also worked as an engineer and disc jockey for KKUP in Cupertino, California.
Career Phreaking
Draper was introduced to the world of phone phreaking in 1969 by Denny Teresi, who, like Draper, was a pirate radio broadcaster. Accounts of how their first meeting came about differ in the retelling. Sometime after his discharge from the Air Force and while he was living in San Jose, Draper received a phone call from Teresi, a blind teenager living in a San Jose suburb. In one version, the call came after Draper had broadcast his phone number seeking feedback from listeners. In another version, the call was a chance wrong number dialed by Teresi that resulted in a conversation. Whatever the circumstances, that call led to Draper seeking Teresi out and ultimately meeting him at his home in the San Jose suburbs. Teresi told Draper about a network of friends who called themselves phone phreaks, many of whom were also blind. Using cassette tape recordings and a Farfisa electric organ to replicate electronic tones used to control it, they explored the phone network to understand how it worked and to make free long-distance calls. Among the group of friends was Joseph Engressia, who went by the moniker Joybubbles, who had perfect pitch and could whistle precisely the 2600 hertz tone used by AT&T to indicate that a trunk line was available to make a call. Gathering around clusters of payphones, they would play the tones into the receiver and explore the network, calling distant locations for free.
Draper learned from Teresi that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal in 1963 emitted a 2600-hertz tone.Wozniak, S. G. (2006), iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. W. W. Norton & Company. . The discovery that the toy whistle could be used to generate the telephone network's 2600-hertz control tone was made by a Los Angeles-based phone phreaker who used the pseudonym Sid Bernay. The tone disconnected one end of a trunk while the still-connected side entered operator mode. The vulnerability was limited to call-routing switches that relied on in-band signaling.
Learning of Draper's knowledge of electronic design, Teresi and other phreakers asked him to build a multifrequency tone generator, known informally as a blue box, capable of generating the 2600-hertz tone and other tones used to control the telephone network. Draper built a crude electronic blue box and subsequently designed a more sophisticated version. By 1970, the phreaking hobby had spread, and its enthusiasts had begun gathering regularly on a conference call-like system they called 2111. The name came from a misconfigured teletype switching machine in British Columbia designed for connecting multiple teletype lines at once. The phreakers discovered that if they called the number at the same time, they would all be connected, creating a primitive conference call. During one of these calls, Draper adopted the moniker Captain Crunch, inspired by the toy whistle.
As telephone networks transitioned from in-band signaling to common-channel signaling systems such as Signalling System No. 7, blue boxes and 2600-hertz whistles ceased to work on upgraded portions of the network. The whistles subsequently became collectible souvenirs of the phone-phreaking era, and the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, founded in 1984, was named after the tone.
Profile by Esquire In 1971, journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote about phone phreaking for Esquire. The article relied heavily on interviews with Draper and conferred upon him a sort of celebrity status among people interested in the counterculture. Reflecting on the reporting of the story years later, Rosenbaum described Draper as determined to make himself the central character in it. Draper frequently interrupted phone calls between Rosenbaum and other phreaks as a way of demonstrating his technical abilities. "All throughout it, during the reporting of the story, he was injecting himself into the story. It was fairly clear that, with some justice, he considered himself if not the star, certainly a star in the phone phreak firmament."
In one interview with Rosenbaum, Draper explained his prevailing ethos concerning phone phreaking:
The article caught the attention of Steve Wozniak, then an engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley. After reading about Draper and phone phreaking, Wozniak contacted Draper and arranged to meet him at KKUP, where Draper was working as an engineer. Wozniak brought his friend Steve Jobs to the meeting, and the three compared techniques for building blue boxes. Wozniak and Jobs subsequently built and sold blue boxes themselves.
Criminal cases and cooperation with FBI
The notoriety of the Esquire article led to Draper's arrest by the FBI in May 1972 on seven counts of fraud by wire. The charges stemmed from illegal long-distance and international calls to New York and Oklahoma, and a phone number answering service in Sydney, Australia, that played a recorded message listing that country's most popular songs. After pleading no contest he was given a suspended sentence of one year in prison, a $1,000 fine and five years probation. Under the terms of his probation, he was forbidden to share his technical knowledge for building blue boxes and making free calls. Draper's activities during this period were later documented by journalist Steven Levy in his 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which profiled Draper among the figures associated with the development of early hacker culture.
Following that conviction, Draper remained under FBI surveillance. In 1975, while visiting New York City, he bragged to a friend who happened to be an FBI informant that phone phreakers had learned how to use phone company technology to eavesdrop on calls and specifically claimed to have done so on phone lines belonging to the FBI's San Francisco field office. That friend, a longtime drug dealer named Chic Eder, offered to provide evidence against Draper in exchange for parole and money. He traveled to California with Draper to purchase a Blue Box. The informant also prodded Draper to demonstrate the interception of an FBI call and recorded the evidence on tape. FBI investigators, working with phone company engineers, replicated the technique described. The episode triggered a complex investigation that ultimately led to Draper being indicted on two charges of toll fraud.
His sentence of four months at the federal prison in Lompoc, California, made him the first phone phreak to spend time in federal prison. As part of a plea deal, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI by explaining phone system vulnerabilities, how to exploit them, and how to fix them.
In 1978, Draper pled guilty to one count of possession of a device to steal telecommunications services and was sentenced to three to six months in a Pennsylvania jail. The conviction violated the terms of his federal parole. He returned to California to face the impact of his parole violations. He underwent two psychiatric evaluations which found that "Draper tend[s] to pass himself off as the victim claiming that he has almost no control over all of the troubles that now beset him", and that he had "numerous paranoid delusions" concerning being singled out for persecution because of his knowledge about the phone system. In March of 1979, he was sentenced to spend one year in a work furlough program. He spent nights in the Alameda County jail, where he wrote computer code on paper, and days entering it into an Apple II. The result was EasyWriter.
Hardware and software developer
Homebrew Computer Club Draper was involved with the Homebrew Computer Club during its early months. Founded in 1975, the club brought together computer hobbyists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area to exchange technical information, software, and hardware designs during the emergence of personal computing. Its participants included Steve Wozniak, who demonstrated the Apple-1 there, Steve Jobs, and Lee Felsenstein, who became the club's moderator and later designed the Sol-20 and Osborne 1 computers.
In June 1975, the club's newsletter credited Draper with establishing a group library account at Call Computer, intended to give members shared access to useful programs.
Apple Computer and the Charley Board Draper's association with Steve Wozniak predated both the Homebrew Computer Club and the founding of Apple. Wozniak recalled seeing Draper use a teletype to connect to ARPANET and play chess with a computer in Boston. The demonstration inspired Wozniak to build a television terminal capable of communicating with remote computers. He later incorporated a microprocessor into the design, an important step in the development of the computer that became the Apple-1.
In 1977, Draper worked for Apple as an independent contractor, and was assigned by Wozniak to develop a device that could connect the Apple II computer to phone lines. Wozniak said he thought computers could act like an answering machine, and modems were not yet widely available. Draper designed an interface device dubbed the "Charley Board", which was designed to dial toll-free telephone numbers used by many corporations and to emit touch tones that would grant access to the WATS lines in use by those companies. In theory, this would allow unlimited and free long-distance phone calls. Upon learning of the Charley Board's capabilities, Apple's CEO Mike Scott canceled the project immediately. Some of its techniques were later used in tone-activated calling menus, voicemail, and other services.
"It was an incredible board. But no one at Apple liked Crunch. Only me. They wouldn't let his device become a product," Wozniak said of the episode in 2004.
EasyWriter