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Cap’n Crunch. An article about Draper in Esquire in 1972 had, for instance, inspired two teenagers named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start their first company to build and sell little phreaking boxes. Woz later recalled nervously meeting the Cap’n one day in California. He was a strange, slightly smelly, and extremely intense nomadic engineer. “I do it for one reason and one reason only,” the Cap’n huffed to the writer of that Esquire article, who was a bit baffled why a grown man would find whistling into phones so appealing. “I'm learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System. Do you understand? If 1 do what I do, itis only to explore a System. Computers. Systems. That's my bag,” he said. “The phone company is nothing but a computer."!#° I’d heard about the Amsterdam conference in the 2600 hacking circles, somewhere between the debates about circuit boards and which company was best for the relatively new service of email. The gathering was organized by group of Dutch computer geeks who published their own magazine, Hack-Tic. I sent an email to the founders. One of them, a man with the improbably exotic name Rop Gonggrijp, sent back an irresistible reply. “On August 4", 5t and 6 we’re organizing a three-day summer congress for hackers, phone phreaks, programmers, computer haters, data travelers, electro-wizards, networkers, hardware freaks, techno-anarchists, communications junkies, cyberpunks, system managers, stupid users, paranoid androids, Unix gurus, whizz kids, warez dudes, law enforcement officers (appropriate undercover dress required), guerilla heating engineers and other assorted bald, long-haired and/or unshaven scum,” the invitation began. Data travelers? Electro-wizards? Warez dudes? | had to go. “Also included,” the note continued, “are inspiration, transpiration, a shortage of showers (but a lake to swim in), good weather (guaranteed by god), campfires and plenty of wide open space and fresh air.” In those early days of the Internet, there was only the barest tickle of a commercial instinct at work. If anything, most of the people at places like 2600 or Hack-Tic were profoundly anti-commercial. They were hobbyists, as entranced by role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons as by their clapped-together, often unreliable digital machines. It was no accident that firms like Apple had emerged from groups with names like The Homebrew Computer Club, names that suggested a rooty, self- defining hippy ethos. Everyone you met in that world fell pretty squarely into one of those weird-by-weirder categories Rop Gonggrijp had listed in his email. Their relaxed, nerdish temperament was reflected in the design of the Internet itself - open, generous, easy to manipulate, emotional at times in debates over protocols, freedom loving. The net design was, as well, a reaction against the systems that troubled all of us most. Like AT&T, say, which was closed, stingy, and tough (therefore enjoyable) to manipulate. Jon Postel, the American engineering and programming genius who had helped write some of the essential original protocols of the Internet, summed up this point 130 “The phone company”: Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire Magazine (October 1971) 93 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018325