John T Draper, a k a Cap'n Crunch is perhaps the most legendary
phone phreak.
The
golden era of phone
phreaking was in the late 60's and early 70's, and
consisted of groups of phone addicts in
New York,
Florida,
SF and
elsewhere exploring and exploiting the phone system. He was one of the first to
actually design and build a properly working
blue box, with which you then
make phone calls for free from any phone. Together with other
phreakers in the
SF Bay Area, he lead much of the phreaker exploration of the
Ma Bell phone
system just by trial and error. They actually did a lot of work for the phone
company by reporting broken lines they came upon. They also got
arrested and
sent to jail one by one.
In 1971 he became a friend of Woz's, who naturally was very
interested in phreaking and also tried to build his own blue box, which he
eventually did. Cap'n Crunch actually wrote the first word processor for the
Apple II computer, "EasyWriter". He was also one of the members of
The Home Brew Computer Club, where Woz would make his legendary presentation
of the Apple, in front of Steve Jobs and others.
The Cap'n Crunch cereal box whistle actually needed to have its third hole
glued up, in order to produce the desired 2600 Hz tone. Cap'n Crunch spent some
time in jail in 1972, in Lompoc minimal security prison for telephone
fraud.
Source: webcrunchers.com/crunch, discovery.com et al.