Phreaks and Geeks: Joybubbles and the Pre-History of Hacking

“The phone to me was the closest thing to God on earth.” Joe Engressia Jr,. aka Joybubbles

It wasn’t that long ago that you had to make a conscious decision to use technology. Until the late 1980s or even into the 1990s depending on their job, many people didn’t use computers on a daily basis. So the main everyday interaction most folks had with technology was the telephone, the analog bundle of plastic, wires, switches, bells, and amplifiers that sat on end tables and kitchen walls, idly waiting to turn potential energy into kinetic energy and bring the sound of a friend or loved one buzzing down the line. 

For Joe Engressia, the telephone was not just a communication device or a way to connect with friends, it was his friend. Literally. Born blind in 1949 in Richmond, Va., Engressia emerged from a difficult, sometimes abusive childhood and became one of the original phone phreakers, a proto hacker whose innate ability, curiosity, and absolute joy in the act of discovery is conveyed so artfully and honestly in Rachael J. Morrison’s new documentary Joybubbles. 

To understand phreaking, you have to understand a couple of weird things about mid-century America. One, the phone network was controlled by a monopoly in the form of AT&T. This was a good old-fashioned government-sanctioned monopoly, the kind that ruled the American economy for decades and set prices however they saw fit. In the case of long-distance phone calls, those prices were high enough that even as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s I remember my parents waiting until Saturday night to call my grandparents and running through the family updates at 3x speed to avoid huge charges. 

And two, the phone network at that time was entirely analog, made up of an insanely complex web of physical switches, long lines, and for many years, humans, who were part of the loop. The system relied in part on a series of tones that served as commands for the various types of switches, which would perform specific actions based on the tone. 

Blessed with perfect pitch, Engressia discovered as a kid that he could whistle specific tones into a phone handset and bend the analog network to his will. For a blind, often isolated boy without much in the way of human interaction, this was a revelation. It opened up the wider world to Engressia, who began exploring the phone network, finding quirks and bugs and hidden features that enabled him to connect to people around the globe. (If you’re noticing a similarity between Engressia and the character Whistler in Sneakers, that’s not a coincidence.)

Morrison uses archival audio from Engressia (who died in 2007) and interviews with his friends to show the sheer joy these explorations gave him and the sense of wonder and mischievous accomplishment he got from figuring out things he wasn’t supposed to know. He was curiosity given human form. 

“I didn’t know there were people hacking into the telephone system before computers. I didn’t know there were hackers before computer hackers."

Engressia eventually shared his knowledge with other like-minded folks–some who were just looking for free calls and many others who wanted to figure out how the network worked. That knowledge was not readily available in those pre-internet days, restricted mostly to phone company engineers and technicians. 

You can see where this is going. 

Large corporations tend to take a dim view of people abusing their systems (and not paying for them), so Engressia eventually ran into some legal troubles during his college days but eventually wound up finding a job with a regional phone company in Denver. A path from mischief to corporate money that many a hacker would follow decades later. 

But there was a third act waiting for Engressia. He soon grew bored by his corporate gig and moved to Minneapolis, where he changed his name legally to Joybubbles and started a hotline that gave callers weekly recorded stream of consciousness episodes on whatever topic struck his fancy. The hotline attracted callers from around the world who became Joybubbles devotees from afar and later morphed into a famous service called the Zzzzyzzerrific Funline that ran until his death. 

The phreaking scene exists both as a precursor and a separate branch of the hacking scene, an artifact of an analog world where phones were black boxes with mystical properties just waiting to be discovered. Morrison, who told Variety that she first became aware of Joybubbles through his obituary, treats both Joybubbles and phreaking with the same curiosity and reverence that the man himself showed phone networks.  

“I didn’t know there were people hacking into the telephone system before computers. I didn’t know there were hackers before computer hackers,” she said in the Variety interview. 

The story and the movie are fascinating. When I first got into the security industry in 2001, the old school phreakers were still around (some still are, like Steve Wozniak). You could find them at DEF CON and get some fanciful stories about blue boxes and whistles and things of that nature. Joybubbles shows the ways these people weaponized their curiosity, shared their knowledge and laid the foundation of the hacker scene and culture that would soon follow. It does what it says on the package.