A core group of phone hackers gathered on the 2111 conference, including Engressia (who, at 22-years-old, was called the Old Man), and one particularly intense guy named John Draper, who chose a handle based on that infamous cereal box whistle: “Captain Crunch.”īack when there was only one phone company (AT&T) and a five-minute long-distance call could cost the equivalent of $25, the incentives for hacking the system were clear. One of the most influential was the 2111 conference, born in May 1970 when a teletype circuit deep inside a Vancouver phone switch was misconfigured so that any number of people could connect to each other for free, provided they knew the trick. The kids found hidden conference lines to share tips. They invented electronic devices to mimic the control tones: “blue boxes” to hide you from the phone company’s billing system and “red boxes” to trick pay phones by mimicking the sound of a coin falling into a slot.
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Other people figured out how to do the same thing using bird calls and toy flutes - bosun’s whistle given away in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes made a perfect 2600 hertz tone.
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After a few years of experimentation, Joe Engressia was able to whistle free phone calls. But as long as no one was systematically making high-pitched tones into their phone - and who would ever do something like that? - the whole thing worked fine.Īround 1957, a seven-year-old blind kid with perfect pitch started systematically whistling high-pitched tones into his phone. Once in a while, someone might accidentally make this tone, resulting in a confused switch and a dropped call.
In particular, they listened for a high-pitched tone (seventh octave E, or 2600 hertz) to signal that a phone line was on the hook and should not be billed. The machines that replaced human switchboard operators in the forties and fifties listened for control signals over the same lines that people talked over. It started with a simple engineering decision in a more innocent time.
It documents a strange time when the most complex single machine on the planet could be controlled with bird whistles. Lapsley’s book is the definitive history of the Golden Age of “phone phreaking” in the 1960s and 70s, when these quirks in the system were the basic tools used by dedicated network explorers to keep in touch and share knowledge. As Phil Lapsley points out in his new book Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell, the voices between the beeps also served as a subtle introduction, a way into a hidden world. But just a decade or two earlier, “talkable” busy signals and loop arounds were more than a free way for bored kids to hang out and trade numbers. So you might give out the number of a “loop around” - another quirk in the system which allowed two people to connect directly, but still anonymously and toll free.īy the time I heard the howling voices between the beeps in the early 1980s, the network hidden inside the phone switches was degraded and debauched, composed of vestigial chat lines that would soon go silent. If you wanted to have an actual conversation with one of these intermittent voices, you still wouldn’t want to holler out your home number to the random weirdos hanging out on busy signal circuits. On other nights, there might be a lone male voice solemnly chanting “Hello” into the pause, lunging with pubescent urgency at any female voice responding with a confused “Hello?” A glitch in the pre-digital phone circuits turned some busy signals into party lines, at least for as long as you could stand the constant beeping. ON SOME NIGHTS in the early 1980s, the pauses between certain busy signals in Southern California were filled with a gibbering chaos of voices nearly as loud as the beeps themselves.
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