![]() ![]() While facing prosecution, he remained on the Autodesk payroll but did no work for the company. He pled guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges in 1988 and entered a diversion program. In 1987, Draper was charged in a scheme to forge tickets for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. John Draper in Canberra, Australia, 1995 Autodesk and other venturesĭraper joined Autodesk in 1986, designing video driver software in a role offered to him directly by co-founder John Walker. Draper sued and the case was later settled out-of-court. ![]() Distributor Bill Baker also hired other programmers to create a follow-up program, Easywriter II, without Draper's knowledge. Draper formed a software company called Capn' Software, but it booked less than $1 million in revenue over six years. Draper later ported EasyWriter to the IBM PC, and it was selected by IBM as the machine's official word processor, beating competing bids from Microsoft. While on a work-release program during a third period of incarceration in 1979, Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II. In 19, Draper served two prison sentences for phone fraud. Some of its techniques would later be used in tone-activated calling menus, voicemail, and other services. They wouldn't let his device become a product," Wozniak said of the episode. In theory, this would allow unlimited and free long-distance phone calls. Draper designed an interface device dubbed the "Charlie Board," which was designed to dial toll-free telephone numbers used by many corporations, and to emit touch-tones that would grant access to the WATS lines in use by those companies. Wozniak said he thought computers could act like an answering machine, and modems were not yet widely available. In 1977, Draper worked for Apple as an independent contractor, and was assigned by Wozniak to develop a device that could connect the Apple II computer to phone lines. Hardware and software developer Apple Computer Wozniak and Jobs later set up a small business selling blue boxes. Also present was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs. Wozniak and Draper met to compare techniques for building blue boxes. However, it also caught the attention of University of California, Berkeley engineering student and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who located Draper while working as an engineer at the radio station KKUP. The notoriety from the article led to Draper's arrest in 1972 on charges of toll fraud, for which he was sentenced to five years' probation. Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire Magazine (October 1971) as republished by Slate The phone company is nothing but a computer. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. When first contacted by Rosenbaum about the story, Draper was ambivalent about being interviewed, but also in the same breath explained his prevailing ethos: The article relied heavily on interviews with Draper and conferred upon him a sort of celebrity status among people interested in the counterculture. In 1971, journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote about phone phreaking for Esquire. The whistles are considered collectible souvenirs of a bygone era, and the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is named after the audio frequency. This change rendered the toy whistles and blue boxes useless for phreaking purposes. phone lines relied almost exclusively on out-of-band signaling. After 1980 and the introduction of Signalling System No. The vulnerability they had exploited was limited to call-routing switches that relied on in-band signaling. The tone disconnected one end of the trunk while the still-connected side entered an operator mode. Among the phone phreaks, one blind boy who had taken the moniker of Joybubbles had perfect pitch and was able to identify frequencies precisely.ĭraper learned that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal emitted a tone at precisely 2600 hertz-the same frequency that AT&T long lines used to indicate that a trunk line was available for routing a new call. The group had previously used an organ and cassette recordings of tones to make free calls. Learning of Draper's knowledge of electronic design, they asked him to build a multifrequency tone generator, known informally as a blue box, a device for emitting audio tones used to control the phone network. Teresi and several other phone phreaks were blind. ![]() A call from fellow pirate radio operator Denny Teresi resulted in a meeting that led Draper into the world of "phone phreaks", people who study and experiment with telephone networks, and who sometimes use that knowledge to make free calls. While testing a pirate radio transmitter he had built, Draper broadcast a telephone number to listeners seeking feedback to gauge the station's reception. ![]()
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