The Captain. Wednesday evening, I had the honor of meeting John T. Draper, aka Captain Crunch, the legendary hacker who inspired Jobs and Woz, among many others, way back when. He's now working at a company called ShopIP, where, according to the business card he gave me, he's a "database programmer." In between his infamous phone phreaking days and ShopIP, he's had a very interesting life, as revealed in this recent NY Times article on him:
One of the anecdotes I found most fascinating -- and heartbreaking! -- from that piece is the story about the only copy of Draper's autobiography, which he'd been working on for four years, getting stolen from his car. Wow. To make matters worse, he was homeless at the time, driving from San Diego to Florida, "where he had heard of an opportunity to work in Web-site development."
There are many legendary figures here in Silicon Valley....But there may be no tale so poignant as that of John T. 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.
One of the anecdotes I found most fascinating -- and heartbreaking! -- from that piece is the story about the only copy of Draper's autobiography, which he'd been working on for four years, getting stolen from his car. Wow. To make matters worse, he was homeless at the time, driving from San Diego to Florida, "where he had heard of an opportunity to work in Web-site development."