He also demonstrates whistling 2600hz during that interview, including doing so on one of the only US trunks in service at the time still using it for supervision.
> Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was found to be able to produce the tone, leading to further exploit by John Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.
Not true, even he admitted, belatedly, that Denny Teresi introduced him to it:
> Denny called me and told me about this whistle that blew the magic tone that disconnects long distance phone calls, and that he had a spare. He asked me if I could drive him to San Francisco so he could show me how it worked.
Thank you for the corrections! Looks like I have to revisit some history. I never did make it that far back in the Off The Hook archives, despite being a 2600 subscriber for about the last decade. Hacking history is nothing short of muddy waters hiding all sorts of interesting things.
I was born in the very late 1970's, so I had the pleasure of trying to build my own Blue Box just as payphones were starting to see their death in the early 1990's. It was my first real attempt to be part of a group I felt I belonged with; the hackers. I grew up with the verbal history I mentioned, which as you pointed out is factually incorrect, but I cannot deny the power that mythos had over my thinking for the last few decades.
Thanks. I was in Team Virus and later Team Phreak, and we had plenty of people coming to tell their stories of being either Draper or the first to discover red/blue boxing after we put out NPA-NXX. A lot of absolute nonesense, but tons of fun while it lasted.
"The stark shift happened fast; in 1995, the number of pay phones in the U.S. peaked at 2.6 million, Slate reported in 2022. In less than three decades, that's dwindled to fewer than 100,000."
Joybubbles (formerly Joe Engressia) specifically denied being the first. In this interview (no timestamp), he mentions having heard of others phreaking as far back as the 50s: https://www.2600.com/offthehook/mp3files/1991/off_the_hook__...
He also demonstrates whistling 2600hz during that interview, including doing so on one of the only US trunks in service at the time still using it for supervision.
> Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was found to be able to produce the tone, leading to further exploit by John Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.
Not true, even he admitted, belatedly, that Denny Teresi introduced him to it:
> https://www.dailydot.com/debug/john-draper-beyond-the-little...
> Denny called me and told me about this whistle that blew the magic tone that disconnects long distance phone calls, and that he had a spare. He asked me if I could drive him to San Francisco so he could show me how it worked.