…the plastic toy whistles once offered in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal produced exactly the right 2,600-cycle pitch to fool a long-distance “trunk” into thinking it was another trunk seeking contact, thus opening the portal to globe-girdling phone phun. (…)
Like the other pioneering phreaks, Draper was implicitly counterculture, but no wrathful system-fucker: he didn’t want to bring Ma Bell down, he wanted to get inside her, seduce and make love to her. His goal, fiddling the blue box in Seattle, jumping trunks in London, and stacking tandems in Hong Kong on the way to calling the phone in his other hand, was not revolution, or even confrontation. It was pure knowledge…
