The Best of Times

History is something that we're always living but rarely appreciating.  This year, all of that changed for us.  We got the incredible opportunity to truly acknowledge the significance of the changing trends and technologies that we have been witnessing since 1984.  And now we're ready to share what came out of it all.

We're happy to announce the publication of our first-ever book: The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey.  When we were first approached with the idea for this project, it seemed a daunting task.  And it was.  After all, how could we possibly pick and choose from 24 years of publishing?  And how would such a collection be ordered?  The almost infinite amount of themes and subject matter we've gone through in so many issues made this seem like something we could never pull off.

So our biggest challenge was getting this massive amount of articles into some sort of order.  After much brainstorming, we found the answer to be staring us in the face the whole time.  What we've witnessed throughout all of our pages spans three very distinct decades: the 1980s, the 1990s, and the post-2000 period.  And that is how we decided to divide the book.  By decade.  In so doing we quickly discovered that there was a very noticeable change of mood and tone when looking at such periods as cohesive units and then comparing them to each other.

For example, the 1980s was filled with a sense of wonder as so many new things were starting to come into play.  The Bell System was being (((torn apart))).  Computers were becoming more and more popular and being found increasingly in the home.  Hackers were among the first to figure it all out, finding ways of shaping the technology to their needs, and, naturally, getting into a load of trouble for their efforts.  But there was still this link to the past, where mainframes dominated and phone phreaks lived in fear of arousing the ire of Ma Bell.

The 1990s was a period of growth where both telecommunications and the concept of the Internet soared into the stratosphere.  Suddenly, everyone seemed to be following this stuff and the hacker world felt the effects in both good and bad ways.  Having more people getting involved was certainly nice.  But all of the attention was a royal pain in the ass.  Hackers had always been looked upon with suspicion and paranoia but now it had graduated to genuine fear and the desire to put certain offenders behind bars.  We saw that happen too many times.  The dot-com boom turned many of our friends into very rich people and that tended to put all sorts of values on a collision course.  And of course, this was the decade that the media really jumped into the fray.  There were books and movies about hackers galore.  Again, a bit of fun and a bit of a pain.

Then came 2000 and beyond.

The world in this period seems to have gotten so much more serious.  Everyone appears obsessed with security and convinced that everyone else is out to get them in one way or another, whether it be by stealing their identity or blowing them to smithereens.  The net has become a fixture in our daily routines, speed and storage just keep increasing on a continual basis, and communicating has never been easier.  But somehow, the innocence of our past seems to have been diminished.  To many, the simple romance of playing with new technological toys is noticeably lacking and technology has become more of an assumed fact of our everyday lives.  It's actually become easier for many of us to stay connected than to try and disconnect.

In each of these distinct periods, we found there to be one remaining constant.  The hacker culture has remained true to its beliefs and largely unaffected by the changing world around us.  If you look at one of our articles from our early days and compare it to something from this issue, you'll notice that, while the technology is completely different, the spirit behind the writing has more or less remained the same.  It's always about asking questions, performing all sorts of experiments, theorizing, and, above all else, sharing the results with the rest of us.  Throughout all of the change and turmoil, this much has remained.

Once we realized that we had these three unique decades and a common thread that ran between them, it was just a matter of picking the stories that best summed up what was going on at the time.  As it turned out, this was another daunting task.  There were just so many fascinating pieces that have gone into our pages over the years that it became painful to decide which ones would be included and which would have to be left out.  And even after we had done a whole lot of cutting and trimming, it was all too clear that we just had an overabundance of material.  Trying to fit it into a 360 page book would be next to impossible.  In fact, just the 1980s could have easily filled the entire page allocation if we had let it.

Fortunately, our publishers had the good sense to lobby for a dramatic increase in size for the book and we found ourselves with a limit that was over 600 pages instead.  As the months went on, this wound up being increased once more to nearly 900 pages!  Apparently, the publishers had just as difficult a time figuring out what to cut as we did.  What better endorsement could we possible ask for?

In the end, we wound up with a pretty neat collection of some of what's been going on in the hacker world in the last quarter century.  While it's titled The Best of 2600, there are still lots of good pieces that didn't make it in for one reason or another.  But we believe that if you look at all of the pieces that are included, you'll get a pretty good sense of what's been happening in our unique world since our first issue in 1984.  (In fact, the very first article in our very first issue ended with the sentence: "Turn the page and become a part of our unique world.")

We want to thank the many readers who have been suggesting something like this for years.  We do listen to these suggestions and we're happy that the opportunity presented itself where we could actually bring these ideas to fruition.  We also want to thank Wiley Publishing and the many people over there who have worked with us on this project since it began last year.  We now have something which can make a good deal of our material a lot more accessible, not only to our existing readers but to a vast number of others who have never even heard of 2600 and whose only perception of what hackers are about comes from the mass media.  This is a tremendous opportunity to have our voices heard in a whole new arena and to open some doors in what others only see as walls.

And for many of us, this will be an amazing trip down Memory Lane.  We tend to forget all of the magic of the past and the significance of the differences in the way things used to work, both big things and little things.  An era when something like Caller ID was seen as extremely controversial, when packet switched networks were all the rage, when pagers were far more prevalent than cellular phones, when sending electronic mail between different computer systems was a really big deal.  It's one thing to simply remember those days, quite another to immerse yourself in the words and emotions of the time period.  What's most amazing to us is how relevant it all is, even when the technology is almost unrecognizable.  And for those of you who weren't even alive back then, there is no better way to get a true sense of the history that we all know is out there somewhere.

The Best of 2600 will officially be released at The Last HOPE conference and will be available thereafter all over the world.  We doubt there will ever be a book with this much information about the hacker world crammed into so many pages.  But we certainly do hope to see a lot more hacker-related books and an overall increase in the interest level stemming from all of this.  Because one thing we learned from going through every article we ever printed, apart from being utterly captivated by some of the stories, is that this stuff really does matter.