The Twilight Years of Cap'n Crunch

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Tech pioneer John Draper, a legendary, eccentric figure in Silicon Valley better known as Cap'n Crunch, has slipped to the margins while his peers became rich, the Wall Street Journal writes in a profile. Draper was a 'phone phreak' and helped develop the technology for word processing and voice-activated telephone menus; meanwhile, he eluded the mainstream by tampering with the phone system, frequenting the rave scene and shouting at anyone smoking anywhere near him. 'Once tolerated, even embraced, for his eccentricities, Mr. Draper now lives on the margins of this affluent world, still striving to carve out a role in the business mainstream,' says the WSJ. More from the article: 'Contemporaries who've gone on to riches and fame say they've tried to help Mr. Draper over the years. Mr. Wozniak says Mr. Draper's problem is that his skills lie in technology rather in making business deals or starting a company. "He didn't come from a business orientation," says Mr. Wozniak.'"

Price of an interview

[jfoust2]

Back in the middle 80s, when I was writing for computer magazines, I was amazed that a young pup writer like me could get an interview with someone as famous as Mr. Crunch. I remember reading the Esquire blue-box article when I was a teen.

I met him at a trade show. When I asked for some time to sit down for the interview, he insisted we go back to his hotel and conduct the interview in the gym. I balked, eventually only getting a few quotes and a picture. It took me a while before I figured out what he really wanted. Apparently Mr. Crunch thought I was cute.

Re:Price of an interview

[YankeeInExile]

Hacker 1: Did you ever work out with Crunch?
Hacker 2: Once ...

There were a lot of "oncers" running around the bay area in that era. The best thing about meeting crunch wasn't meeting crunch -- it was all the hangers on that you met. Steve S. The guys from Berkeley who did the FatMac hack. Edjik. Perry F. John Perry. The list could go on for pages...

Man, woz is out of touch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Draper has no computer technical skills whatsoever, phones != computers. He doesn't understand the basics of modern computer technology, nor does he grasp simple concepts like reading documentation. He's spent some time asking moronic questions (which don't always involve openbsd) on the openbsd mailing list.

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&w=2&r =1&s=draper&q=b [theaimsgroup.com]

Being in the same room with Draper

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if any of you have had the "pleasure" of being in the room with John Draper, but the man's breath is bad enough to gag a maggot. That, coupled with his attraction to young males below the age of consent, and a real lack of social skills make him a less than desirable person to be around. It's no wonder that few people want to have anything to do with him these days. Had he kept his nose clean while he was at Apple, it's likely that his future would have been a lot brighter than it is today. Instead, he was convicted of wire fraud and it's been mostly coasting or downhill for the last 30 years.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas, I think it's much more than just business skillz(!). There's a certain fundmental level of reading people that he lacks - social skills, if you will. I'm sure all us /. readers who live in Los Angeles have met him by now, and most will agree with me that he has some rather eccentric behaviors that make him uncomfortable to be around:

- always insisting on giving his "energy" massages.
- biting the scabs off his hands in public places.
- smoking more weed than needed for medical purposes.

The man needs to take care of himself more. I once took him out to dinner at a really nice steakhouse, and he put more butter on his bread than bread. I've never seen so much salt on a slab of salmon before, either. I felt a heart attack coming on just watching him eat.

I empathize with those who have tried to help him professionally. I tried to put him on a Python contract maintaining some scripts, but Draper's sense of self-entitlement made it really difficult for me to deal with him - I knew it would make it thus difficult for the client to deal with him. I'm sure that Jobs and Mitnick and other industry heavyweights have tried to give him well-paying work, but lacking consistency kills off just about any job. Being able to express gratitude would also be an invaluable social skill.

WSJ opened up story for Slashdot?

[xmas2003]

Yet another nifty page-1 article by the WSJ. When this first came out, I thought it would make a great Slashdot submission, but they had it behind the pay/subscriber-only wall, so I didn't submit it.

Interesting that a few days later, they have made it readable by the masses (under the "Today's Free Features" section) and Carl from the WSJ then submitted to Slashdot. My guess is the URL may not work tomorrow, but this is smart marketing on the WSJ's part to give people a taste of their excellent.

Re:Price of an interview

[redwoodtree]

Actually, not a troll at all. The same thing happened to me.

I was hanging with friends in the Bay Area one night when one of them said "Hey, there's captain crunch". He was just hanging out. So I started talking to him and he offered to show me some things and talk to me more. Being 19 and so excited to meet one of the all-time heroes of phreaking I followed.

Next thing I knew Mr Crunch was on my back (literally) and basically getting himself off. He's an odd, odd, odd odd odd bird. I shook him off and took off as quickly as I could.

Re:So?

[Rob the Bold]

Being intelligent doesn't mean that you'll be rich. Becoming rich takes a certain amount of business acumen or just plain luck.

Ah, good ol' Ecclesiates 9:11.

This is no way means that I don't think that he did some great things or wasn't an interesting person. It just seems like the WSJ is trying to go for the easy, tear-jerker, story.

I guess in the thinking of the WSJ, a skilled and intelligent guy failing to become rich is a tear-jerker. Sure, money does offer a certain degree of freedom, but too much can be just as enslaving -- or so I've heard. If I find out I'll let you know.

Re:Wow

[GeckoX]

I don't agree.

The guy that shows up wearing a t-shirt and sandals to a business meeting, and is consciously thinking 'screw em if they don't like it', is NOT the kind of geek/nerd we're talking about here.

Your typical geek/nerd may appear a bit unkempt not because of a conscious decision, but because of any related thoughts not even entering into their mind.

We're talking the kind of person that can sit down and code for 2 days straight, never even thinking about eating or whatever. People that live in their head.

There's a BIG difference. Most geeks/nerds today really aren't. It's just fashionable to be seen as such, somewhat. And a lot of these people play up the part. Sad, but true.

Unfortunately, it's usually going to be the true geeks/nerds that get fired, let go, walked over, ignored whatever because they don't fit in with the social aspects at their place of work.

Personally, where I work, I try to be very very conscious about peoples abilities, and completely shut off everything else. I don't care if you're a nice guy or not, doesn't matter at all...unless it impacts your ability to do work or other people's ability to do their work. Stink in a meeting? Whatever, you're doing a great job and don't worry we wouldn't make you meet with our customers directly as we know you wouldn't deal with it well.

I've fired people that I actually liked a lot. I've fired more people that I'd actually hang out with outside of work than people that I wouldn't. On a personal level, I really can't stand some of the people I work with. Bottom line is though, that has just about zero impact on how they do their jobs. It takes all kinds.

Re:Just leave him alone

[GeckoX]

Every big city has the proverbial bag person that everyone knows of, has seen, even talked to whatever. Very often these people are WAY more interesting than they are given credit for. There is a guy in London (Canada) that is a tenured university prof. He has published books. Taking the time to actually talk to him will reveal a couple of things. He's brilliant. He's eccentric. He's not like you and me. He's one of the happiest people you'd ever meet.

Some people are very different, and race has nothing to do with it ;)

crossed paths in the 1980s

[peter303]

I recall it was at the Mac users club at Stanford. He seemed to always be working on some project, but usually worked alone on them. Had a bit of grooming issue too, but thats not unusual in Silicon Valley.

Crunchman story

[Anonymous Coward]

I met Draper once, went 'raving' with him (he was a big club raver then), and talked him into signing my homebrew lineman's handset with 'CaptnCrunch', even though he didn't want to go by that nick anymore. So I got his autograph on something worthwhile. Back then I was patching into roadside payphones to get a dialtone to get on the internet, with a torx screwdriver I picked up free from a computer tradeshow. Figured it was time to quit when I opened one box up and black widow spider had made a little happy home in there. The highpoint of my phreaking career was what I called the 'plaid box', or adding a cordless basestation and answering machine inline with a payphone, so you could drive within range of it and make and make free phone calls from inside your car. This worked with those third party carrier payphones. I was a hacker, not a phreaker, so my only interest really was in getting a data connection on the road.

Watched him give an interview in a park to an Indie film crew, and kind of snickered to myself listening to his exploits as a hacker, because I myself at the time was sucessfully hacking ATM machines. There I was standing watching the interview, 10x a hacker, with the film crew oblivious to me but obviously wrapped up in the by gone legend of the Crunch persona.

Beware his attempts to engage you in excercise or 'straighten out your back'. My guess is his short time in prison he went gay. You've got to be predisposed for that however. If you don't want to go gay in prison you don't, nobody forces you to. I did two years in prison (and subsequently won my appeal) and had two consecutive flaming butch fags for roommates and no way in hell was I going to go gay, I hated those SOBs.

He goes to India a lot, and is not as computer illiterate and someone here claimed. He is destitute most of the time back then it seemed to me, living off of payment for 'speaking engagements' which pretty much have run out. Most of his personal hardware are Apple laptops given to him by Woz. I gave him 3 old Pentium boxes one time. He tried selling a firewall for a stint called the 'Crunchbox' I believe, coded by a guy I believe by the name of John Chen?, who did all the programing and was a hardcore fan of NetBSD for its ability to royally lock down the OS security wise.

Had a website http://webcrunchers.com/ [webcrunchers.com] and http://shopip.com/ [shopip.com]

The thing is, if you are good hacker, I mean, a great hacker, you never get caught. Nobody ever even knows your name. You don't advertise. You never develop any attachment to any particular nick. I never got caught. My lovely tour of prison was a freak victim of circumstance thing, I happened to be apparently in the wrong place at the time when something else was going down.

The fun thing about the internet is, you can talk to these folks online. I've talked to Clifford Stoll, and Woz via emails. Never talked to RMS in real life, but almost ran into him. I don't get around much anymore and try to avoid traveling in hacker circles, avoid Defcon, etc.

Re:Crunchman story

[Anonymous Coward]

You are 100% right on! I think that Draper "failed" because he really doesn't know much, but uses others who are in awe of his (created) media persona. There's really nothing there (besides bad teeth). He learned how to use the media very effectively to create an image for himself that he in turn uses to leverage other media stories that improve his image--- in short: it's like paying Visa with MasterCard, only with media presence. I have friends who will hear from him every few months when he runs out of money or just shows up and wants to live with them because he's been evicted. He used the money he had to go to some exotic far off place rather than pay the rent. He needs to bathe more and get his teth fixed and some of my younger friends, kids really, find themselves being conned into "exercising" with him. I warn those that I can, but... Some people just don't believe you. Those who know "Crunch" know that he's a pathetic parasite. I don't know why Mr. Wozniak bothers with him. Steve was successful due to his own efforts and work, maybe he feels guilty or unworthy of that success. You really can't compare Steve Wozniak with Draper at all. He might do better if he wasn't a smelly flake with no teeth or technical knowledge.