Author: Anne Ewbank / Source: Atlas Obscura
Cereal companies have long used box prizes as an inducement for children to nag parents into buying sugary breakfast food. From movie tie-in toys to video games on CD-ROM (remember Chex Quest?), cereal box baubles tend to be momentarily thrilling and then quickly forgotten.
Except when they’re used for hacking.Only one cereal box toy has that distinction: the Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun whistle. Meant to replicate the whistles used by sailing officials (boatswains) to signal mealtimes or commands, the multicolored whistles came along with boxes of Cap’n Crunch starting in the mid-1960s. One fell into the hands of John Draper, a former U.S. Air Force electronics technician. Draper was part of an underground culture that predated hacking as we know it: phone phreaks. These early hackers played certain tones through their telephones to bypass AT&T’s analog system and get free long-distance phone calls.
Draper heard about the whistle from other phreakers. The whistle easily played at 2600Hz, the perfect tone to, in Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak’s words, “seize a phone line.” Though…
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