Then there was the time the infamous phone phreak John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper got busted for forging BART Cards...
Steve Wozniak and his son also got mistakenly busted and thrown in a holding cell for 4 hours because he had a (real) BART card that didn't work, so he got pissed off and ended up paying for Draper's attorney fees, and Draper copped to a misdemeanor of altering MUNI tickets, and went on probation for a year, but did not lose his job at Autodesk.
>TECHNOLOGY. March 1, 1987. JUST TACKY! By CBR Staff Writer.
>Aw c’mon John, forging the electronic characteristics of BART tickets is just tacky! John Draper, who inter alia wrote the Easy Writer word processing package, has been caught with $2,500 of forged access tickets to the San Francisco Bay-Area Rapid Transit subway system, and fellah, BART, which has never fully recovered from the teething troubles in the early days when trains used to whistle through stations at 60mph with the doors wide open, can’t afford it; Draper’s real claim to fame is that he discovered in the 1960s that a toy whistle given away in packets of a glutinous and bilious-coloured sugared corn puff cereal called Cap’n Crunch was pitched just right to mimic the tones AT&T used to set up long-distance calls, so that packs of the sickly Cap’n sold out as kids rushed to claim the whistles that enabled them to call auntie in Montana or Mary in Maine; that was ingenious if wicked, but forging BART tickets – tacky, John, tacky.
>Thanks Tom Barbalet for recording this rare interview with John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" or "Crunchman" these days) about his life at Autodesk, and the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cards fiasco. Also included here are other life and times of "Crunch".
It’s honestly impressive how many times the MTA managed to mess up a switch to contactless.
Fun fact: the same year Metrocard was rolled out to the general public (1997), Hong Kong introduced its Octopus card, a smartcard ticketing system. So Metrocard was to some extent dated on arrival.
Octopus is such an extraordinarily useful system; it may genuinely be the part of day-to-day life in HK that I miss the most.
The cards are stored value, so transactions happen instantly and can be automatically reloaded from a credit card. They also support non-payment-related functions, so you can e.g. register your Octopus as a building access card and not have to carry around a separate token.
Really? I only lived in London briefly years ago, but I can’t remember ever coming across Oyster in any non-transit setting. Maybe it’s like Suica in Tokyo? Technically capable of the same stuff but rarely deployed in practice.
Octopus, in contrast, is almost literally everywhere (except most taxis, sadly). You can use it to buy everything from groceries to petrol.
