The Influence of Phone Hackers on Apple's Evolution

John Draper once managed to connect with Richard Nixon, alerting the president about a critical shortage of toilet paper that threatened the West Coast and potentially the entire nation.

During the 1970s, Draper was a skilled hacker known for exploiting the telephone network to place free calls, eavesdrop on conversations, and perform other ingenious yet unlawful activities. Using social engineering tactics, he cleverly obtained the president’s number by confidently requesting access through a CIA hotline, eventually reaching Nixon himself.

The moment Draper mentioned toilet paper, another voice interrupted, demanding, “Who is this?”

Draper immediately hung up, well-versed in evading detection.

What began as a harmless joke, Draper and his fellow hackers—referred to as phone phreakers in the 1960s and 1970s—ended up significantly shaping the tech industry. While some, like Draper, faced legal consequences, others went on to co-found Apple, a groundbreaking tech giant.

Mastering the Tone

Draper is famously associated with repurposing a cereal box toy. In the late 1950s, Joe Engressia found that whistling at 2600Hz could replicate the tones used by telephone systems, enabling free calls by resetting the line. Though unusual, it worked flawlessly. (Engressia, who was blind, became deeply engrossed in studying telecommunication systems, even posing inside a phone booth in his high school yearbook.)

News of Engressia’s discovery spread rapidly, but replicating the whistle proved difficult for most. Then, in the 1960s, Quaker Oats started packaging a whistle called the Bo’sun in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes. Sid Bernay, a phone hacker, was likely the first to realize that covering one of the whistle’s holes produced a 2600Hz tone. This revelation was shared within the hacker community, including with Draper, a former Air Force electronics expert turned radar technician. In an age of expensive long-distance calls, this was a game-changer. (Or, more accurately, a whistle-changer.)

“To dial 234, I’d just blow the whistle that many times, creating a free call,” Draper explained at a security conference. “You’d call an 800 number, blow the whistle, and hear a chirp, signaling access to an internal trunk line. This wasn’t a regular subscriber line—it was like gaining root access to the entire phone system.”

Draper became known as Captain Crunch and gained notoriety for using the inexpensive toy to bypass toll charges. While the whistle worked, its capabilities were limited, prompting Draper and fellow hackers to create “blue boxes,” devices that could manipulate the phone system. (These were also referred to as “MFers,” short for “multi-frequency.”) These handheld gadgets, resembling dial pads, generated tones that replicated those used in long-distance connections, as detailed in a Bell Telephone technical journal. Some phreakers even called Engressia to have him verify the accuracy of their tones.

Using a functional blue box, phreakers could essentially act as phone operators: They could place or intercept calls. However, Draper stopped eavesdropping after discovering his girlfriend’s infidelity while listening in on her line.

Most phreakers avoided publicity, but their activities came to light when writer Ron Rosenbaum featured Draper and others in a 1971 Esquire article. Draper, cautious with his words, emphasized that free calls were not the primary goal.

“If I engage in this, it’s for one reason alone,” he stated. “I’m studying a system. The phone company is a system. A computer is a system. Do you see? My actions are solely about exploring systems. Computers. Systems. That’s my passion. The phone company is essentially just a computer.”

Draper added that, in theory, just three phone phreaks could potentially overwhelm the entire telephone network, causing anyone attempting to make a call to receive a busy signal. Among those who read the article was Steve Wozniak, who was eager to locate Draper and uncover his techniques.

Wozniak, a college freshman at the time, shared the article with his friend Steve Jobs, a high school senior. Initially, the pair tried to build a blue box on their own, referencing frequencies from a technical manual at Stanford University and attempting to record tones. However, constructing the blue box proved more challenging than expected. Eventually, they succeeded in creating a functional model using digital components instead of analog. Wozniak adopted the alias Berkeley Blue, inspired by his University of California, Berkeley campus, while Jobs went by Oaf Tobar.

Wozniak eventually connected with Draper after hearing him on a local radio interview. In Wozniak’s dorm room, Draper showed them how to build a more effective blue box, enabling Jobs and Wozniak to produce their own and launch a small, semi-legal business. (While tampering with the phone system was illegal, the boxes themselves were not.) They sold the devices to students on campus, offering a written guarantee: if the box failed, they’d repair it for free. In total, they sold between 40 to 100 units, earning around $6,000.

Jobs later reflected on meeting Draper and selling the boxes as a pivotal experience, as it helped him build a rapport with Wozniak and refine their business approach. Soon after, the duo co-founded Apple.

Wozniak, like Draper, had a knack for humor: He once managed to call the Pope directly. Pretending to be National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Wozniak informed the operator he was calling on behalf of Richard Nixon. The Pope was unavailable, as he was asleep. Wozniak tried again an hour later, but by then, the Vatican had contacted the real Kissinger and identified the call as a prank.

Cut Off

Initially, phone companies showed little concern about phone hacking. While they were worried about potential system vulnerabilities, pursuing phreakers would have drawn more attention to the practice. However, by 1972, it became evident that the issue wasn’t disappearing.

After the Esquire article, the FBI became aware of Draper and phone phreaking, confiscating many of the blue boxes Jobs and Wozniak had sold to study their functionality. (They never linked the devices to the duo.) Draper was arrested in 1972 on seven counts of wire fraud. He pleaded no contest to one charge—the rest were dropped—and received five years of probation, a consequence that might have deterred most. (Joe Engressia later joined Mountain Bell as an analyst.) But Draper wasn’t like most people.

Although he held a legitimate position at Call Computer, Draper couldn’t resist the lure of phone phreaking. In 1976, he faced charges of telephone fraud, also known as wire fraud. This time, the consequences were severe: Draper was sentenced to four months in federal prison. He would encounter legal troubles multiple times afterward.

However, such activities came with risks, even in prison. During his time in a Pennsylvania facility, Draper attempted to teach fellow inmates how to make free calls but deliberately provided false information to avoid further complications. When one inmate failed to achieve the promised results, he assaulted Draper, causing a back injury.

Phone phreaking gradually faded in the 1980s as telephone companies began transitioning away from tone-based systems. Thanks to his connections with Jobs and Wozniak, Draper secured a position at Apple. He developed a modem, which was ahead of its time and too innovative even for Apple. He also created EasyWriter, one of the first word processing programs for personal computers. (Part of the program was written during another jail term, where he participated in a work-release program.)

In 2001, Draper established ShopIP, an internet security consulting firm. Like many hackers, he leveraged his expertise to address firewall vulnerabilities. Despite his prominence in the hacking community, his reputation has been marred by controversy. In 2017, several young men accused Draper of inappropriate behavior at conventions. Draper declined to comment to BuzzFeed but later explained to The Daily Dot that his “energy exercises,” inspired by kinesiology, might have caused unintended arousal, though he denied any intentional misconduct. That same year, his autobiography, Beyond the Little Blue Box, was released.

Despite these allegations, Draper’s influence on modern technology is undeniable. The blue boxes created by Wozniak and Jobs paved the way for advancements in communication. In 2020, one of Wozniak’s original blue boxes was auctioned and fetched $125,000.

“If we hadn’t built blue boxes,” Jobs later remarked, “Apple would never have existed.”