Draper is seeking to take part in the Internet boom. With a small group of partners and perhaps a little late to the game Mr. Draper has maintained an almost childlike sense of optimism, and now he is trying to start over. Throughout all of his travels and travails, however, Mr. For years he wandered the world working where he could as a high-tech hobo including the Goa coast in India, where in 1999 he spent six months coding Web sites for an Indian entrepreneur. H e was robbed on a Texas highway where he lost a notebook computer containing the only copy of his autobiography. His back was permanently injured in a prison beating in Pennsylvania. He hacked into computer networks, using some of the same skills he honed on the telephone system. But he has also lost jobs and been homeless more than once. In the intervening decades he was for a while a millionaire who owned a house in Hawaii. He did the early design from a jail cell for EasyWriter, the word processing program that came with the first I.B.M. He was arrested and sent to prison for his telephone exploits several times and graduated from phones to computers. Draper has had a remarkable career since then. Draper, the mythical “phone phreak” who became a national figure in 1971 after being one of the first to discover that a toy whistle in the Cap’n Crunch cereal box could trick the telephone network into giving free telephone calls. There are stories of brilliance and innovation and avarice.īut there may be no tale so poignant as that of John T. There are men like Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. There are many legendary figures here in Silicon Valley. He has spoken at West point on computer security, and is a devotee of raving and goa trance music, having travelled to Goa, India. Draper also worked at Autodesk and En2Go and started his own companies such as Cap’n Software, ShopIP. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has stated that he was the only one at Apple who liked him.ĭraper also designed the first Word Processor for the Apple II, which was IBM’s official word processor. He was profiled in Esquire Magazine in 1971, which caught the attention of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were in an anarchist LSD phase at that time.Įventually, in 1977, he worked for Apple, designing the Charley Board, which would allow the Apple II to act as an answering machine and get free unlimited long-distance phone calls by piggybacking on corporate WATS lines. This method and others were used by Phone Phreaks to get free distance calls, at a time when these calls were extremely expensive. In the late 60s, he was the first person to hack the Ma Bell telephone system, using a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal box to replicate the 2600 frequency that Bell used to indicate that a trunk was available for routing a new call. In 1967 he ran a pirate radio station in Maine. John Draper was born in 1943, the son of an Air Force engineer, and was bullied in school. Tonight we are going to speak an amazing historical figure, John Draper, AKA Cap’n Crunch.
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