John Draper

Early life

Draper is the son of a United States Air Force engineer. As a child, he built a home radio station from discarded military components. He was frequently bullied in school and briefly received psychological treatment.

Draper enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1964. While stationed in Alaska, he helped his fellow service members make free phone calls home by devising access to a local telephone switchboard. In 1967, while stationed at Charleston Air Force Station in Maine, he created WKOS (W-"chaos"), a pirate radio station based in nearby Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.

Following his honorable discharge from the Air Force as an airman first class in 1968, he moved to San Jose, California. He worked briefly for National Semiconductor as an engineering technician and at Hugle International, where he worked on early designs for a cordless telephone. He also attended De Anza College part-time through 1972. During this period, he also worked as an engineer and disc jockey for KKUP in Cupertino, California.

Career

Phreaking

Draper was introduced to the world of phone phreaking in 1969 by Denny Teresi, who, like Draper, was a pirate radio broadcaster. Accounts of how their first meeting came about differ in the retelling. Sometime after his discharge from the Air Force and while he was living in San Jose, Draper received a phone call from Teresi, a blind teenager living in a San Jose suburb. In one version, the call came after Draper had broadcast his phone number seeking feedback from listeners. In another version, the call was a chance wrong number dialed by Teresi that resulted in a conversation. Whatever the circumstances, that call led to Draper seeking Teresi out and ultimately meeting him at his home in the San Jose suburbs. Teresi told Draper about a network of friends who called themselves phone phreaks, many of whom were also blind. Using cassette tape recordings and a Farfisa electric organ to replicate electronic tones used to control it, they explored the phone network to understand how it worked and to make free long-distance calls. Among the group of friends was Joseph Engressia, who went by the moniker Joybubbles, who had perfect pitch and could whistle precisely the 2600 hertz tone used by AT&T to indicate that a trunk line was available to make a call. Gathering around clusters of payphones, they would play the tones into the receiver and explore the network, calling distant locations for free.

Draper learned from Teresi that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal in 1963 emitted a 2600-hertz tone. The discovery that the toy whistle could be used to generate the telephone network's 2600-hertz control tone was made by a Los Angeles-based phone phreaker who used the pseudonym Sid Bernay. The tone disconnected one end of a trunk while the still-connected side entered operator mode. The vulnerability was limited to call-routing switches that relied on in-band signaling.

Learning of Draper's knowledge of electronic design, Teresi and other phreakers asked him to build a multifrequency tone generator, known informally as a blue box, capable of generating the 2600-hertz tone and other tones used to control the telephone network. Draper built a crude electronic blue box and subsequently designed a more sophisticated version. By 1970, the phreaking hobby had spread, and its enthusiasts had begun gathering regularly on a conference call-like system they called 2111. The name came from a misconfigured teletype switching machine in British Columbia designed for connecting multiple teletype lines at once. The phreakers discovered that if they called the number at the same time, they would all be connected, creating a primitive conference call. During one of these calls, Draper adopted the moniker Captain Crunch, inspired by the toy whistle.

Hardware and software developer

Draper was involved with the Homebrew Computer Club during its early months. Founded in 1975, the club brought together computer hobbyists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area to exchange technical information, software, and hardware designs during the emergence of personal computing. Its participants included Steve Wozniak, who demonstrated the Apple-1 there, Steve Jobs, and Lee Felsenstein, who became the club's moderator and later designed the Sol-20 and Osborne 1 computers.

In June 1975, the club's newsletter credited Draper with establishing a group library account at Call Computer, intended to give members shared access to useful programs.

Draper's association with Steve Wozniak predated both the Homebrew Computer Club and the founding of Apple. Wozniak recalled seeing Draper use a teletype to connect to ARPANET and play chess with a computer in Boston. The demonstration inspired Wozniak to build a television terminal capable of communicating with remote computers. He later incorporated a microprocessor into the design, an important step in the development of the computer that became the Apple-1.

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. Wozniak said he thought computers could act like an answering machine, and modems were not yet widely available. Draper designed an interface device dubbed the "Charley 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. In theory, this would allow unlimited and free long-distance phone calls. Upon learning of the Charley Board's capabilities, Apple's CEO Mike Scott canceled the project immediately. Some of its techniques were later used in tone-activated calling menus, voicemail, and other services.

"It was an incredible board. But no one at Apple liked Crunch. Only me. They wouldn't let his device become a product," Wozniak said of the episode in 2004.

While on a work-release program during his third period of incarceration in 1979, Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II. Draper had previously developed an implementation of the Forth programming language for the Apple II, and later said that the need to document his Forth compiler helped motivate him to develop the word processor. EasyWriter was written using Forth and assembly language. He was also inspired in part by Electric Pencil, an early word processor. Draper later ported EasyWriter to the IBM PC after a demonstration of it at a computer fair caught the attention of the founders of Information Unlimited Software, a small software company based in Marin County.

Allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior

In 2017, organizers of at least four hacking and security-related conferences, including DEF CON and Hackers on Planet Earth, said they had banned Draper from attending in the wake of allegations against him concerning unwanted sexual attention toward other attendees. The allegations were reported in two stories by BuzzFeed News.

Further allegations concerning Draper's behavior emerged in reporting by the cybersecurity newsletter The Parallax View. In the story, a hacker given the pseudonym Jay claimed that in 2000, Draper invited him to a room in a San Diego office building. The story also covers claims by University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze, who asserted in a series of social media posts that Draper subjected him to persistent unwanted attention in the 1970s, when Blaze was a teenager.

Additionally, journalist Phil Lapsley alleged that Draper agreed to an interview in exchange for a partially clothed piggyback ride. Lapsley compared the encounter to an account in Doug Carlston's 1985 book Software People: An Insider's Look at the Personal Computer Software Industry, in which Carlston recounted an unnamed journalist's description of participating in stretching exercises with Draper.

Before the allegations were first reported by BuzzFeed News, Draper said that he had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, which he said could have contributed to his behavior. In an interview with The Daily Dot, Draper denied any explicit sexual intent during these encounters and described them as invitations to participate in an "energy workout" involving applied kinesiology. The workouts were described as including massage of the arms and legs, as well as squats and pushups while carrying Draper's body weight. Asked about an allegation that he had experienced an erection during one of the exercises, Draper said that this was possible, while maintaining that he had not regarded the encounter as sexual.

Autobiography

In 2018, Draper and C. Wilson Fraser published Beyond the Little Blue Box: The Biographical Adventures of John T. Draper, a biography and memoir about Draper's life and career, published by FriesenPress. The book recounts Draper's involvement in phone phreaking, his experiences in the early personal-computer industry, and his later work in technology, and includes a foreword by Steve Wozniak.

The book combines Draper's recollections with a narrative by Fraser, who had known Draper for more than two decades. Kirkus Reviews characterized the work as a "biography/memoir" and described it as a "singular and entertaining tech account", praising its candid portrayal of Draper's unconventional life and experiences.

In popular culture

The actor Wayne Péré played Draper in some brief scenes for the 1999 made-for-TV film Pirates of Silicon Valley.

In Ernest Cline's 2011 novel Ready Player One, Draper and his Captain Crunch alias are incorporated into the hunt for the Jade Key. The protagonist interprets references to a "captain" and a whistle as allusions to Draper and the Cap'n Crunch whistle associated with phone phreaking.

Draper appears in the 2001 Channel 4 documentary The Secret History of Hacking, which explores the early history of phone phreaking and computer hacking. The documentary features interviews with Draper, Steve Wozniak, and Kevin Mitnick, who discuss their experiences with the technologies and hacker culture of the period.

Draper is also mentioned throughout the poem "Phreaking" by the poet Neil Hilborn in his collection Our Numbered Days.