Phone Phreaks and their Blue Boxes

Did you know that ...

Way back when personal computers did even exist yet, there were these hacker people (white had & black hat) who liked to explore and play with all sorts of technologies. One of their playing fields was the telephone companies.

Telephone company switches used to be operated by hand a long long time ago. However, as those people were replaced with machines, commands started to be sent through whistles and different tones and notes. By voice (if you have perfect pitch), whistles that came as free gifts in Captain Crunch cereal, and by using the Blue Box, hackers were able to get deep within the phone system and do things that other people couldn't even imagine was possible such as calling for free cross-country, having conference calls on lines deep within the system, and generally taking advantage of the system.

Originally, it was quite difficult for hackers to produce the correct pitch necessary for hacking telephone company equipment. Eventually, John Draper (aka Captain Crunch), one of the foremost phone phreaks, created a device that produced certain tones when you pressed the buttons. This made phone phreaking much easier, since hackers no longer had to rely on whistling the correct pitch to hack telephone networks.

In the October 1971 issue of the Esquire Magazine, Ron Rosenbaum published an article entitled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" that described in detail the people, equipment, and techniques involved in phone phreaking. Soon, the general public knew all about how to place long-distance calls for free, but phone phreaking, for those first pioneering hackers at least, officially died with that article.

Well, now you know!