Re:The Hobby Computer Culture
by robterrell on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @01:00PM
(#44108726)
Here's a fun fact: in the photo of the Byte Shop, the person in the window with their back to the camera is John Draper, the legendary hacker known as Captain Crunch.
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Wild. How do we know that? (Is that his VW outside?)
Re:The Hobby Computer Culture
by robterrell on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @05:09PM
(#44110704)
My uncle is Paul Terrell, the owner of that Byte Shop. He showed me the photo and told me who was in the window. But I don't have an independent verification of this -- dunno, maybe Captain Crunch is a lurker here?
Very cool.
Almost like the Putnam question on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Re:The Hobby Computer Culture
by BizarroLand on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @03:15PM
(#44109880)
I've been fascinated with the phreaks ever since I downloaded my first copy of the anarchists guide off my local BBS.
You might like Evan Doorbell's YT channel then – he has a lot of old tapes from his misspent youth traveling the world on Ma Bell's dime, and has posted a lot of videos explaining it all for a generation (like mine) without any frame of reference.
Evan's stuff is excellent and worth watching/listening to.
Shameless plug: if you like his stuff, you might also like my book, "Exploding The Phone", which is a history of phone phreaking. https://explodingthephone.com/
Evan narrated the Audible version. :-)
I enjoyed your book, made sense of a lot of things 13 year old me had stumbled upon that I could never get to work (as I was maybe 5 years too late).
That's awesome, thank you!
Re:The Hobby Computer Culture
by throwaway9191aa on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @05:53PM
(#44110960)
I very much recommend this book as well. Great read. Thanks for writing it!