a person who uses electronic equipment to gain unauthorized access to long-distance telephone services.

I think it’s pretty cool from a historic stand point.

Back in the early 70s a guy named Jon Draper figured out that a toy whistle that came in a box of Captain Crunch cereal was the perfect frequency to initiate free long distance phone calls when blown into a phone.

Sometime after that people realized they could build an electronic device that could produce that frequency and two guys started building them and made a decent amount of money off it: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak before they started Apple Computers. So Apple Computers’ startup was funded in a large part by Phone Phreaking devices.