[robterrell]

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.

[BizarroLand]

I've been fascinated with the phreaks ever since I downloaded my first copy of the anarchists guide off my local BBS.

[nxobject]

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.

https://www.youtube.com/@evandoorbell4278

[plapsley]

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. :-)

[panzagl]

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).

[plapsley]

That's awesome, thank you!

[throwaway9191aa]

I very much recommend this book as well. Great read. Thanks for writing it!

[RF_Savage]

Exploding The Phone was an excellent read.

[JKCalhoun]

Wild. How do we know that? (Is that his VW outside?)

[robterrell]

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?

[vram22]

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...

[JKCalhoun]

Very cool.