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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;desertgem, post: 467644, member: 15199&quot;]Lehigh, really ancient history but..</p><p><br /></p><p>Well, way back then, before personal computers, hackers could only find computers at universities, work, or perhaps an internal computer system that ran telephone switching and billing. I was lucky and had an 1130 computer that I programmed a small basic interpreter ( all input and output was with punch cards) so I wasn&#039;t &quot;really&quot; into Phone Phreaking, using switching signals to allow phone transmission to go anywhere and do many different things which hackers considered fun , but Ma Bell played &quot;hardbell&quot; with them. Now this is ancient, but the phone system used tones for switching operations and pulses for the numbers. &quot;Supposedly, it was discovered that the tone that gave control of the switches was 2600 hertz, thus the name of the magazine. Also at that time Captain Crunch Cereal had a &quot; Sailor&#039;s whistle&quot; as a package insert prize ( wouldn&#039;t make safety regs today) and the whistle produced a 2600 hz tone, which when sounded into the telephone handed over most of the internal system once a person knew what to dial next. Dumpsters Divers collected old Bell systems manuals and came up with many &quot;hacks&quot;, mainly dialing long distance without a charge to the phone. Once the magazine 2600 started making some of these public, Ma Bell tried to close them down and also threatened any subscriber. Eventually tone generators were utilized, and the &quot;rumor &quot; is that Wozniak of Apple Computers was an early inventor.</p><p>The story is long and convoluted, but maybe this will help explain what I meant by a &quot;Captain crunch toot&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>Old Jim[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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