A plastic whistle from a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal happened to blow at exactly 2,600 hertz, the tone AT&T used to mark a long distance trunk line as idle. Because the phone company sent its control signals down the same channel as callers’ voices, anyone who could reproduce that tone could take over the network. John Draper, born in 1943 to an Air Force engineer, learned the trick in 1969 from a circle of blind teenage phone phreaks and then engineered the blue box, a tone generator that mimicked an operator’s console.

This episode follows Draper from an Alaska air base, where he rigged a military switchboard so airmen could call home, to a 1971 Esquire profile that brought Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to his door. He gave them the blue box schematics and a philosophy of open systems. The same refusal to accept limits led to FBI arrests, federal prison, corporate dead ends, and a late exile from the hacker community he helped create.

• A phreak known as Joybubbles had perfect pitch and could whistle 2,600 hertz himself, dropping the billing while the line stayed open.
• After a 1972 wire fraud arrest and probation, Draper boasted to an FBI informant in 1975 about tapping the bureau’s own lines. He served four months at Lompoc, the first phone phreak to do federal time.
• On work furlough from an Alameda jail in 1979, he wrote code in pencil in his cell at night and typed it into an Apple II by day. The result was EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II.
• Hired by Wozniak in 1977, Draper built the Charlie Board, a phone interface that worked like a computerized blue box. Apple’s Mike Markkula canceled it.
• In 2017, DEF CON and Hackers on Planet Earth banned Draper after reports alleging decades of unwanted physical contact, which he denied carried sexual intent.