For my birthday, I was given a small whistle, made from blue plastic and bearing an image of Cap’n Crunch and his dog. It was given out as part of cereal box promotion sometime back in the Dark Ages. This is absolutely the coolest gift I have ever recieved, bar none. You see, this is no ordinary whistle. It blows a fairly decent approximation of a 2600hz tone, a tone of no great significance unless you happen be an older piece of telephone switching hardware. At one point in the illustrious history of telecommunications, weirdos, hackers, and phreaks alike could do terrible things to poor old Ma Bell using tone-generators, blue boxes, red boxes, and a veritable rainbow of things that Alexander Graham Bell, had he even conceived of them, would have damned straight to hell. The 2600hz tone happened to be a particularly important tone in all this, leading to a lot of laughing hackers and phreakers, very angry telecom technicians, and a few desperately confused cereal-purveyors.
So now I am the proud owner of a shrill blue plastic piece of hacking/phreaking history, and a dilemma. I need to find some kind of gift to reciprocate, something equally cool. Obviously, this kind of thing is heavily dependent on personal preferences and experiences (the whistle, and phreaking in general, speaking to a period of misspent youth), but I’m certain people could suggest a lot of really neat gadgets, gubbins, historically interesting items, and other things that ANY self-respecting nerd or geek would be glad to get as a gift. Under $100 would be nice, but please, don’t limit suggestions on my account.