Swiggy1957
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1965. The notorious Captain Crunch whistle. Found to to be able to be used to steal free long telephone calls from the telephone company.
The Bo'sun Whistle was a prize included in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes in the late-1960s. The cereal company didn't realize the whistles emitted a 2600hz tone--a sound that could trick telephone routing equipment into giving people free long-distance telephone calls. "Phone phreakers"--a group of pranksters that repurposed technology to infiltrate and test telephone system limits--prized these whistles.
devon292
I can already hear the Reveille whistle from the pic alone
SalmonMax
Not shown: The Captain Crunch Bo'sun's Truncheon, for keeping those lowly swabs in line. Fun for all ages!
GuitarBobMonterey
Magazine article back then told how a hacker used this to connect long distance calls around the globe and finally rang the payphone rt next to him.
icanhasimgur
Hack the Planet
GgrAzdXXfz9O
The whistle in the box is this cheap plastic thing, the picture on the box looks like actual metal. Nice of them to put the words 'actual size' next to the picture.
seventhpoet
The movie the core. Where he use foil and a comb to blow a specific tone on a cell lol
wailbait
The Core is an absolute masterpiece. Ever single thing in the movie is hilariously wrong.
kaijuuGold
hoes be bussin when they hear the bo'sun whistle
twelvoclocklevel
Bullwinkle's niece
MWM75
Didn't Wozniak make electronic versions of this with h8m and Jobs selling them?
Swiggy1957
Why yes. Yes they did. Had Phineas and Ferb been around back then, they'd have doneit too.
joezap
This is where the hacker magazine 2600 got its name.
shastaRed
I still subscribe.
ChicanoBatman
neato. thanks for this lil nugget of knowledge
kJerAFK
irc.2600.net we are still around
ThatWeirdishGuy
2600 got its name from the tone, not the whistle. It was already well known that you could control phone company equipment with the tone, but before this you had to build an electronic box to generate that tone. With the whistle you just had to buy cereal.
sarahsaurroar
I love how one of those whistle codes means 'Run! You broke a window!'
ShipForBrains
Five oh! Five oh!
CitrusyGarlic
As an old who grew up before safety and shatter-resistant glass was ubiquitous like it is today I can attest that this used to be a fairly common childhood problem
dingofdong
Feels like the fairly distinct and loud sound of shattering glass would relegate that one to having a fairly niche set of actual use cases lol
TheMouseOfMadness
Yeaaaah, we don't generally talk about him much these days. He's banned from a lot of conventions for a reason.
Anonymouse64
Huh? Who is?
TheMouseOfMadness
the infamous phreaker credited for finding this out, Cap'n Crunch, took the name from the discovery
ridureyu
I love how Cowboy Bebop made a reference to this that didn’t get screwed up in the translation.
WelJon
Thata the 1st thing I thought of
XeononSolomon
Don't worry that dude who wrote Ready Player One made sure to include it in his book so the younger teens know this fact too
FlipTheBirdBeforeTheBirdFlipsYou
In the audiobook, read by Will Wheaton, Will Wheaton is elected as the president of the internet (or the meta verse, I don’t remember which)
ridureyu
Younger teens? Reading a book meant for dad forty-year-olds who only consume forty-year-old nostalgia?
jimjong1
Everyone I know who read the book was in high school when it came out or afterwards.
Eikre
GamemasterAnthony will soon celebrate his 49th birthday
wadatahmydamie
My favorite part about that book is the part where someone makes a reference, and then there’s a whole page written about the reference and they all agree it was a good reference.
Nightchime
Not everyone knows that in Ready Player Two, there are more references and more pages affirming the validity of the references. One in particular stood out to me: Prince (or the artist formerly known as) was quite the musician.
wadatahmydamie
It’s like the author said “Let’s go Crazy,” which is a reference to the Prince song of the same name from his album Purple Rain. Fuck yeah, I’m such a good writer for thinking of that
BosunMark
Someone read Ready Player One..
IHaveAGuyForEverything
Some of us lived it.
L00kH4rd3r2718
We're not all dead yet lol. I used a weird little box that would make a different tone for each type of coin. I don't recall how we made it, but it sure was handy in the days of payphones and pagers.
Them3OtherGuys
I figured out how to make free calls on first gen digital payphones in the late 80s. Something something hacker myself.
badcode4o4
the one i knew was skypage, called long distance all the time using that
SodaForBlood
drizztx
I figured out the code that would trip the hopper to dump any retained coins into the return instead of to the bin. Made a few $ per day.
cheezencrackers
The * # trick?
10thlettersauce
Record the clicks
cheezencrackers
Ah, yup yup
NachtReborn
Actually, that makes you a "phreaker", not a "hacker".....to be pedantic
aloharamada
That sounds just as wizard, if not wizarder