Three of this year's covers were done by a new artist, Holly Kaufman Spruch, while the Summer cover was done by veteran Ken Copel.

The mini-cover in the upper right-hand corner continued to appear for all issues.  The covers this year were notable in that they focused on world events much more than in the past.  It was also a very eventful year on a number of levels.

Our Winter 1989-90 cover focused on another global milestone: the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

In Romania, a dictator was toppled and demonstrators waved the national flag with the Communist coat of arms cut out of the middle.  We turned that around a bit and showed soldiers with an American flag that had the stars cut out of it, possibly a reference to the federal government overstepping its authority on the states with draconian laws that affected hackers.

The phrase "you talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war..." appears on a television in the sky, along with a war plane, suggesting that even after the end of the Cold War, Western powers were still fixated on fighting someone or something.

That phrase came from the Worms Against Nuclear Killers (WANK) worm, which many view as one of the first instances of hacktivism, possibly emanating out of Australia.  NASA computers were hit with the WANK worm in October, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A wall is also seen on the cover, with the phrase "Let X=Y" with a red slash through the equal sign, meaning the rules have changed and what we are told to assume is no longer the case.

The mini-cover was a throwback to a character from our early years (a clip art waiter holding two stacks of dishes) with the phrase "THANK YOU' above them along with the AT&T logo.  We can only assume we were thanking whoever or whatever was responsible for the recent AT&T crash that provided us with so much material.