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."1° 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 da