Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600

Chapter 1. Question Upon Question

If for some reason you had to sum up the entire hacker culture in one single word, that word would simply have to be "questions." It's what we live for, what drives us, what always gets us into so much trouble. And it's one of the things 2600, as a hacker magazine, gets the most of from readers. So it's only appropriate that we begin this collection with a sampling of some of the many questions we've received over the years.

They take on a number of forms, and you'll see common themes in the hacker world that have survived to this day, along with technical issues that might have been the norm at one time but which seem utterly bizarre and outdated today. Still, the desire to learn is what ultimately matters, and if our magazine somehow managed to date back another century, I think we'd recognize those components in whatever questions the readers might have asked back then.

So what sorts of things have people been curious about throughout our history? Well, there were those questions that we must have gotten asked a thousand times: What does "2600" mean? How do I become a hacker? Is it illegal to read this magazine? Can you show me how to hack into Hotmail?

The idea for us was to give people answers to the things they were interested in while teaching them ways they could figure it out on their own. Of course, there are always those questions that have nothing to do with anything we're about, and that's where you might see an instance of a sarcastic ...