I had a decoder ring. Captain Crunch I think.
Frankly I'm amazed my mom didn't slap me and my brother silly for fighting over cereal box surprise ...
I remember waking up and, first thing, thinking about the cereal prize I'd get when I got downstairs ... great marketing. As a kid they were awesome.
Once upon a time long ago there was a whistle that came as the prize in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal that would allow you to make
toll-free telephone calls to anywhere in the world. Absolutely free. You'd just blow the whistle into the telephone's receiver and voila ... you were clear to dial. This was the legendary Cap’n Crunch Bosun Whistle.
There was this blind guy known as "Joybubbles" who was a “phone phreaker”, a type of early hacker based on telephone technology (many Phreakers were blind) and Joybubbles had perfect pitch and so over time he had “mapped” the tones & frequencies that AT+T used in controlling their phone system ... as well Joybubbles could whistle (with his lips) at a perfect 2600 hertz and could open the AT+T long trunk lines and could then act in operator mode and dial anywhere for free.
Another phreaker, a guy named John Draper, was known as “Captain Crunch” because he was the one who discovered the Cap’n Crunch Bosun Whistle’s ability to sound at 2600 hertz, and who later went on to work on designing “blue boxes” ... devices that would generate those tones electronically to open the telephone trunk lines.
Around that time, another pair of guys, known as “Oak Toebark” and “Berkeley Blue” to make some extra money created brilliantly designed blue boxes and also black boxes (black boxes allowed you to receive calls from anywhere at no charge to the caller) ... these guys also were early members of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club and whose real names were both “Steve”.
Oak Toebark later became known as the Mozart of Digital Design. Steve & Steve who designed and sold those illegal Blue Boxes would be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founders of Apple Computer ... and so, as Paul Harvey would say, now you know the
rest of the story ...