Waynes World 2 Easter Egg - Cap'n Crunch

I'm sorry but that's stretching it!

and who would want to break (phreak) into payphones anyway...?

Sorry, I mean getting free calls out of them as apose to breaking into them. And people would want to break into them to get the cash out of them, maybe??

what "CASH" do you get from a payphone? a couple of quarters at the most!

when you do that to a phone it gives you a free phone call. and there are other tones that activate a coin return. and if the phone is in a high traffic area you can get 40 bucks a night

um this isnt an egg because the movie is set in the late 80s early 90s

You guys have it all wrong. What you do is call an 800 number. Then you play the whistle. The phone company thinks you hung up. Then you can call any number in the world for free. I don't think it works anymore. I read it all in Bigger Secrets by William Poundstone.

(re above) ah yes, because reading means its true-- fair point to apply to the rest of my comment here though, as im basing my information on tons of stuff I've read on the net about phone phreaking, anyway--the captain crunch whistle worked because it emitted a certain frequency tone (stay with me here). Older pay phones used a tone to signify that you had inserted a coin, there were different tones for quarter, dime, and nickel, and these tones were what actually enabled you to make the call. so if you knew this, and could find a device or other way to play the correct tone (say a quarter tone to make things easy) then you could trick the phone into thinking you were plunking quarters in, and the infamous captain crunch whistle just happened to whistle at one of these tones, thats how it worked.

Actually, when you deposit your money, a small tone registers, at least it used to. Phreak boxes simulated those tones, which would be played into the receiver, and you'd get your free call. After phreak boxes became more popular, the phone company fixed the problem.

Here's the deal.. the cap'n crunch whistle was discovered in the early 70's I believe, and was used to gain direct access to Ma Bell's switching equipment. The whistle made a 2600mhz tone that when whistled onto a phone line at any time would drop the phone call, and you could then use a blue box and basically do anything an operator could do. To simulate a coin going into a payphone, a redbox would be used. A standard tone dialer from radio shak that is slighty modified with a 6.55360 mhz crystal would let the asterisk key on the keypad have the same tone generation a nickel would have going into the payphone. 5 short bursts of the * key would then reproduce the sound of a quarter going in. In the late 80's early 90's payphones were catching on to this and would mute the handpeice in order to not allow any audio to pass through the phone line. However, an easy way was found around even that.. just deposting any coin (a nickel) would then un-mute the microphone enabling the redbox to then be used.

I hope all of you are aware that Steve Wozniak (the founder of Apple) was the one who invented the "Blue Box" in high school.(along with a few other little gadgets that got him in alot of trouble)

This is how it works. The old analog AT&T phone system used something called in band signaling. The signals to tell the switches what to do were carried audibly in the same channel as voice. The switch had to know the difference between a pause in conversation and someone hanging up. This is where the 2600 frequency comes in. When the call is diconnected the 2600 frequency is played until the line is picked up again. By playing this tone into a phone one could stay on the line, while making the telco think you hung up. At this point a person had the ability to do a number of things. Other than getting the dime they put in returned to them, getting change out of the phone was not one of them. Most of this info came from Newton's Telecom Dictionary. If this subject interests you, I suggest you get a copy.

First of all, i't was John Draper (A.K.A Captain Crunch) who discovered the 2600hz whistle in the pack of cereal and designed the first Blue Box, not Steve Wozniak (Although Woz did make several Blue Boxes in highschool and sold them to friends. He only nearly got caught with one, but got away). I live in Australia. I started phreaking when I was 11 (I built a Beige Box, or Linesman Handset). Keep in mind that the 2600hz tone does not work to the extent that it did back in the day, since the telco's have upgraded most of their equipment considerably since then. Like hacking, Phreaking is commonly seen by the media as malicious. We rarely are able to make free calls, and we have a code of ethics that most of us follow.

This is all great, but i seem to remember that the scene in question was just a panning shot accross the kitchen and there on the table just so happened to be a box of Cap'n Crunch, no whisle, no referance to any pay phone trickery just a box of cereal, how have you people got to this nonsence with a box of cereal turning up in the best Movie in MM's career?