5 ms·

John "Captain Crunch" Draper, the Hacker's Hacker

53 points by raganwald 16y ago

lylejohnson 16y ago
> a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 hertz... 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is named after this whistle frequency Now I'm curious whether the Atari 2600 was also named after this. I've just done a little bit of Googling but so far haven't come up with any hints on the origin of the game console's name. Does anyone know?
- raganwald 16y ago
  Not sure, but the magazine "2600" is absolutely named after this. FWIW, Wikipedia suggests otherwise: The console was originally sold as the Atari VCS, for Video Computer System. Following the release of the Atari 5200, in 1982, the VCS was renamed "Atari 2600", after the unit's Atari part number, CX2600.
- M1573RMU74710N 16y ago
  IIRC it's because it's model designation was CX2600. They didn't use the 2600 designation originally (they called it the Atari VGS or something like that).I think they started using it because like Pong, they planned to release various versions of the system. Whether the model number was a reference to that is hard to say. It's not like they have much to do with eachother, and Atari had been naming their products with C---- model numbers for years...but it's conceivable that someone said "let's make it model 2600" with 2600hz in mind.
abyssknight 16y ago
I can now confirm that I've met Captain Crunch, or at least seen him in person. We were at DEFCON 17 and a friend of mine was talking to him. Apparently they had lunch together, and he's a really down-to-earth, fun guy.
- ax0n 16y ago
  One thing, though... make sure you politely decline if he asks if you want to do anything involving massages or exercise. Unless you're into having sex with old men, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
  - joshhart 16y ago
    I take it there's some kind of story here?
    - ax0n 16y ago
      There's definitely a story here. I haven't experienced it myself. I met him a loooong time ago, and he seemed as normal as anyone else at DefCon (back in the late 1990s). But I've heard the stories, too, from multiple people.
      - david_shaw 16y ago
        For those looking for references to the "massage" stories, it's actually pretty well documented in an old CNN story covering the HOPE conference a few years ago: http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/paranoia.idg/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/paranoia.id... Not to say that Capn Crunch didn't contribute greatly to the hacking/phone phreaking scene, but now a days it seems like he's pretty much just a rude creep. Excerpt from the article: "Script kiddies!" spits John Draper, 57. "Think they're hot (stuff)." The grizzled veteran got his handle, Captain Crunch, in the early '70s, when he discovered that a plastic whistle from a cereal box emitted a tone crucial to phreaking. In 1978, Draper spent four months in jail for his illicit proclivities and these days, tries to stay legit. "You should try one of my body tune-ups," he says. "It's a great energy boost." Indeed, he spends a good deal of the conference enticing young attendees back to his hotel room, where he offers full-contact "stretching" sessions. And the Captain seems to have absorbed the lesson of the "Selling Out" talk all too well. "Did you get my URL?" he says. "ShopIP.com. It's e-commerce for the rest of us!"
  - calloc 16y ago
mpc 16y ago
"Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1979. According to The Wall Street Journal, he hand-wrote the code while serving nights in the Alameda County Jail, then entered the code later into a computer." Amazing...
- angrycoder 16y ago
  Still amazing, but the paragraph right after that gives more detail. "Draper's personal website furnishes a more detailed version[1] of the coding of EasyWriter. Draper was in prison, in California, at the time, but under a 'work furlough' program. This meant that while he had to spend every night in prison, he spent each day working a regular job outside prison. This job was at Receiving Studios, a small band practice studio, and while there he had access to a computer, where he coded EasyWriter. He did take copies of the code 'home' to prison overnight to work on it."
jbellis 16y ago
John Draper was in one of my SQLAlchemy tutorials at PyCon a couple years ago. Very cool that he's still out there hacking.
calloc 16y ago
I met John Draper at SCALE 5x, eventually a huge group of us went out to dinner at some asian restaurant with him. He was talking about some new anti-spam venture he was starting up and how he would love for us (I was a student at the time) to help him start up his company and sort spam. All we would have to do (without monetary compensation) would be see if an email was spam and file it as such, and then he would sell the data we were generating to other companies that could then provide actual anti-spam solutions based on human interpretation of messages rather than just computer checked. Overall I didn't like him. It smelled like he hadn't showered in at least a couple of days, and he was making rude sexual comments regarding the wait staff, overall my gut feeling was to get away from him as he was nothing good. Here was someone who was a hero to so many people making an absolute fool out of himself and presenting himself as someone who has no social skills what so ever. When I saw him at DefCon 17 it didn't seem like he had changed much, a friend of mine said she went up to him to just talk to him, seeing as how he is a legend, and all he did was make rude comments regarding taking her upstairs to his room and whatnot and she just turned around and walked away disgusted. It is pretty cool he is still out there working on various projects, but overall he could use an overhaul on his social skills and learn that when you gain some sort of status in a community you have to act appropriately. Ultimately while John Draper used to be one of the guys I looked up to as having done some really awesome things I was saddened in how he acted in public.
- bh42 16y ago
  I've never met him person, but from the videos I've seen it is pretty obvious the man is pretty far on the aspie spectrum. Perhaps with massive intervention early on he could have learned to be almost normal. But at his age, I think we should all keep in mind that as much as he is a geek stereotype we're all trying to overcome, and as much as people like him can be dicks and sexists, and hurt others, it is not easy being him. This does not excuse his behavior. I think his work is worth of admiration and his social skills of, not scorn, but pity.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
kroc 16y ago
An alternative view of Captain Crunch: http://www.osnews.com/story/20606/_Captain_Crunch_on_Apple http://www.osnews.com/story/20606/_Captain_Crunch_on_Apple (see the snippet from the Recollection article). Read the full recollection article, this is an important read re: phreaking
iuguy 16y ago
I met John at Hackers At Large in a field in the eastern Netherlands. The group I was with spent a fair bit of time with him, had some good chat and I thought he was alright at the time. I think his grip on reality wasn't that great, but to be fair at the time god only knows what people might have given him. Two days in someone asked him about Jobs and Woz, he said he thought Woz was a nice kid but he didn't really get on with Jobs. I didn't know he actually worked at Apple for a while though. For the comments about him being creepy, fair enough. My experience of him in Holland was that he was definitely not the type of guy you introduce to your mother, and that he had social issues, but lots of people do. As for the comments on hygiene, wake up - we live in a world where people like Richard Stallman pick bits from their toe and eat it in the middle of conferences, don't judge an old man because he smells funny. Maybe one day you'll be a funny smelling old man/girl.
- marquis 16y ago
  I may have been at the same conf as you, I met John there also while I was hanging out a good friend of his. I found him cordial, humourous, engaging, and not egotistical (though aware of his fame). It may depend on the time of day you meet him, but he has a certain charm and I always remembered meeting him with a fondness.
raganwald 16y ago
At times like this I'm deeply saddened. Nobody is doing anything wrong, but yet... Focusing on Draper's awful social presence at the expense of discussing what he actually did or didn't do during his heyday... Seems so very un-hacker to me. I feel like we killed the farmer, took over the farm, but we're the pigs saying that all hackers are equal, but some hackers are more equal than others. Why? Because we seem to be saying that getting along with others is more important than hacking. Of course it is when it comes to making friends, finding love, selling a dream, building companies, and almost everything we do as humans. But yet... Hacking is somehow not one of those things to me. Obviously the man should not get a free pass for unacceptable behaviour--I have unbearably strong views about certain programming personalities who express racist, sexist and other views I find abhorrent--but I wish that his social misbehaviour was a footnote and his hacking was front and center. For whatever reason, discussion of what he did or didn't do is attracting way less attention than discussion of his personal life. Oh, well. Too late to delete the submission. (If I'd thought that we are going to end up talking about full body massages and whether having a shower makes it acceptable to invite a stranger to your room at a computer conference... I'd have judged it as being "Not Hacker News.")
- dkarl 16y ago
  Agree, mostly. Smelly assholes are a dime a dozen; talented hackers with such a colorful story are rare. It isn't very hackerish to focus on a boring, easy, and unstimulating aspect of the man rather than the parts we could draw inspiration from. (Unless, that is, the people focusing on his bad behavior are doing so because they are learning not to behave that way themselves. That at least would make sense.) On the other hand, what can we really learn from the Wikipedia article? It's great to be bright and accomplished, and we should strive to be so ourselves? The phone system used to run on tones? I think most of us know that stuff already. Maybe that's why people are resorting to gossip.
- chaostheory 16y ago
  "At times like this I'm deeply saddened. Nobody is doing anything wrong, but yet... Focusing on Draper's awful social presence at the expense of discussing what he actually did or didn't do during his heyday... Seems so very un-hacker to me." Let me know if you feel the same way once you meet him face to face. Points if you actually partake in the stretching exercises.
captaincrunch 16y ago
Wow, I suppose I chose the wrong Hacker News user name...
- X-Istence 16y ago
  Yeah ... definitely did; wait a minute, is that you John?
gxs 16y ago
Wow, I hadn't heard his name in years. Just like that you sent me back to '99. 8th grade, me, a 1337 hacker wannabe. I used to subscribe to 2600 magazine. As a side note, he got his name from the fact that he figured out that a toy whistle in captain crunch cereal boxes produced the frequency he needed to game the telephone system. I'm sure I didn't do the description justice, but that is the gist of it.
joeycfan 16y ago
I once had an ICQ friendship with him back in the day. Then one morning I went to the computer (which I never turned off) only to find ICQ jammed in the middle of a transfer of a file of some kind to him. I had authorized no files. I send him a nasty remark and dumped him from the list.

53 points by raganwald 16y ago

> a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 hertz... 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is named after this whistle frequency Now I'm curious whether the Atari 2600 was also named after this. I've just done a little bit of Googling but so far haven't come up with any hints on the origin of the game console's name. Does anyone know?

raganwald 16y ago
Not sure, but the magazine "2600" is absolutely named after this. FWIW, Wikipedia suggests otherwise: The console was originally sold as the Atari VCS, for Video Computer System. Following the release of the Atari 5200, in 1982, the VCS was renamed "Atari 2600", after the unit's Atari part number, CX2600.
M1573RMU74710N 16y ago
IIRC it's because it's model designation was CX2600. They didn't use the 2600 designation originally (they called it the Atari VGS or something like that).I think they started using it because like Pong, they planned to release various versions of the system. Whether the model number was a reference to that is hard to say. It's not like they have much to do with eachother, and Atari had been naming their products with C---- model numbers for years...but it's conceivable that someone said "let's make it model 2600" with 2600hz in mind.

abyssknight 16y ago

I can now confirm that I've met Captain Crunch, or at least seen him in person. We were at DEFCON 17 and a friend of mine was talking to him. Apparently they had lunch together, and he's a really down-to-earth, fun guy.

ax0n 16y ago
One thing, though... make sure you politely decline if he asks if you want to do anything involving massages or exercise. Unless you're into having sex with old men, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
- joshhart 16y ago
  I take it there's some kind of story here?
  - ax0n 16y ago
    There's definitely a story here. I haven't experienced it myself. I met him a loooong time ago, and he seemed as normal as anyone else at DefCon (back in the late 1990s). But I've heard the stories, too, from multiple people.
    - david_shaw 16y ago
      For those looking for references to the "massage" stories, it's actually pretty well documented in an old CNN story covering the HOPE conference a few years ago: http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/paranoia.idg/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/24/paranoia.id... Not to say that Capn Crunch didn't contribute greatly to the hacking/phone phreaking scene, but now a days it seems like he's pretty much just a rude creep. Excerpt from the article: "Script kiddies!" spits John Draper, 57. "Think they're hot (stuff)." The grizzled veteran got his handle, Captain Crunch, in the early '70s, when he discovered that a plastic whistle from a cereal box emitted a tone crucial to phreaking. In 1978, Draper spent four months in jail for his illicit proclivities and these days, tries to stay legit. "You should try one of my body tune-ups," he says. "It's a great energy boost." Indeed, he spends a good deal of the conference enticing young attendees back to his hotel room, where he offers full-contact "stretching" sessions. And the Captain seems to have absorbed the lesson of the "Selling Out" talk all too well. "Did you get my URL?" he says. "ShopIP.com. It's e-commerce for the rest of us!"
- calloc 16y ago

mpc 16y ago

"Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1979. According to The Wall Street Journal, he hand-wrote the code while serving nights in the Alameda County Jail, then entered the code later into a computer." Amazing...

angrycoder 16y ago
Still amazing, but the paragraph right after that gives more detail. "Draper's personal website furnishes a more detailed version[1] of the coding of EasyWriter. Draper was in prison, in California, at the time, but under a 'work furlough' program. This meant that while he had to spend every night in prison, he spent each day working a regular job outside prison. This job was at Receiving Studios, a small band practice studio, and while there he had access to a computer, where he coded EasyWriter. He did take copies of the code 'home' to prison overnight to work on it."

jbellis 16y ago

John Draper was in one of my SQLAlchemy tutorials at PyCon a couple years ago. Very cool that he's still out there hacking.

calloc 16y ago

I met John Draper at SCALE 5x, eventually a huge group of us went out to dinner at some asian restaurant with him. He was talking about some new anti-spam venture he was starting up and how he would love for us (I was a student at the time) to help him start up his company and sort spam. All we would have to do (without monetary compensation) would be see if an email was spam and file it as such, and then he would sell the data we were generating to other companies that could then provide actual anti-spam solutions based on human interpretation of messages rather than just computer checked. Overall I didn't like him. It smelled like he hadn't showered in at least a couple of days, and he was making rude sexual comments regarding the wait staff, overall my gut feeling was to get away from him as he was nothing good. Here was someone who was a hero to so many people making an absolute fool out of himself and presenting himself as someone who has no social skills what so ever. When I saw him at DefCon 17 it didn't seem like he had changed much, a friend of mine said she went up to him to just talk to him, seeing as how he is a legend, and all he did was make rude comments regarding taking her upstairs to his room and whatnot and she just turned around and walked away disgusted. It is pretty cool he is still out there working on various projects, but overall he could use an overhaul on his social skills and learn that when you gain some sort of status in a community you have to act appropriately. Ultimately while John Draper used to be one of the guys I looked up to as having done some really awesome things I was saddened in how he acted in public.

bh42 16y ago
I've never met him person, but from the videos I've seen it is pretty obvious the man is pretty far on the aspie spectrum. Perhaps with massive intervention early on he could have learned to be almost normal. But at his age, I think we should all keep in mind that as much as he is a geek stereotype we're all trying to overcome, and as much as people like him can be dicks and sexists, and hurt others, it is not easy being him. This does not excuse his behavior. I think his work is worth of admiration and his social skills of, not scorn, but pity.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 16y ago

kroc 16y ago

An alternative view of Captain Crunch: http://www.osnews.com/story/20606/_Captain_Crunch_on_Apple http://www.osnews.com/story/20606/_Captain_Crunch_on_Apple (see the snippet from the Recollection article). Read the full recollection article, this is an important read re: phreaking

iuguy 16y ago

I met John at Hackers At Large in a field in the eastern Netherlands. The group I was with spent a fair bit of time with him, had some good chat and I thought he was alright at the time. I think his grip on reality wasn't that great, but to be fair at the time god only knows what people might have given him. Two days in someone asked him about Jobs and Woz, he said he thought Woz was a nice kid but he didn't really get on with Jobs. I didn't know he actually worked at Apple for a while though. For the comments about him being creepy, fair enough. My experience of him in Holland was that he was definitely not the type of guy you introduce to your mother, and that he had social issues, but lots of people do. As for the comments on hygiene, wake up - we live in a world where people like Richard Stallman pick bits from their toe and eat it in the middle of conferences, don't judge an old man because he smells funny. Maybe one day you'll be a funny smelling old man/girl.

marquis 16y ago
I may have been at the same conf as you, I met John there also while I was hanging out a good friend of his. I found him cordial, humourous, engaging, and not egotistical (though aware of his fame). It may depend on the time of day you meet him, but he has a certain charm and I always remembered meeting him with a fondness.

raganwald 16y ago

At times like this I'm deeply saddened. Nobody is doing anything wrong, but yet... Focusing on Draper's awful social presence at the expense of discussing what he actually did or didn't do during his heyday... Seems so very un-hacker to me. I feel like we killed the farmer, took over the farm, but we're the pigs saying that all hackers are equal, but some hackers are more equal than others. Why? Because we seem to be saying that getting along with others is more important than hacking. Of course it is when it comes to making friends, finding love, selling a dream, building companies, and almost everything we do as humans. But yet... Hacking is somehow not one of those things to me. Obviously the man should not get a free pass for unacceptable behaviour--I have unbearably strong views about certain programming personalities who express racist, sexist and other views I find abhorrent--but I wish that his social misbehaviour was a footnote and his hacking was front and center. For whatever reason, discussion of what he did or didn't do is attracting way less attention than discussion of his personal life. Oh, well. Too late to delete the submission. (If I'd thought that we are going to end up talking about full body massages and whether having a shower makes it acceptable to invite a stranger to your room at a computer conference... I'd have judged it as being "Not Hacker News.")

dkarl 16y ago
Agree, mostly. Smelly assholes are a dime a dozen; talented hackers with such a colorful story are rare. It isn't very hackerish to focus on a boring, easy, and unstimulating aspect of the man rather than the parts we could draw inspiration from. (Unless, that is, the people focusing on his bad behavior are doing so because they are learning not to behave that way themselves. That at least would make sense.) On the other hand, what can we really learn from the Wikipedia article? It's great to be bright and accomplished, and we should strive to be so ourselves? The phone system used to run on tones? I think most of us know that stuff already. Maybe that's why people are resorting to gossip.
chaostheory 16y ago
"At times like this I'm deeply saddened. Nobody is doing anything wrong, but yet... Focusing on Draper's awful social presence at the expense of discussing what he actually did or didn't do during his heyday... Seems so very un-hacker to me." Let me know if you feel the same way once you meet him face to face. Points if you actually partake in the stretching exercises.

captaincrunch 16y ago

Wow, I suppose I chose the wrong Hacker News user name...

X-Istence 16y ago
Yeah ... definitely did; wait a minute, is that you John?

gxs 16y ago

Wow, I hadn't heard his name in years. Just like that you sent me back to '99. 8th grade, me, a 1337 hacker wannabe. I used to subscribe to 2600 magazine. As a side note, he got his name from the fact that he figured out that a toy whistle in captain crunch cereal boxes produced the frequency he needed to game the telephone system. I'm sure I didn't do the description justice, but that is the gist of it.

joeycfan 16y ago

I once had an ICQ friendship with him back in the day. Then one morning I went to the computer (which I never turned off) only to find ICQ jammed in the middle of a transfer of a file of some kind to him. I had authorized no files. I send him a nasty remark and dumped him from the list.