Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600

Chapter 6. Our Biggest Fans

I'd have to say, far and away my favorite part of the letters column—in fact, my favorite part of the entire magazine—is answering the nasty mail. That's why this is the biggest chapter in this collection.

Let's not give the wrong impression. We don't get more hate mail than anything else; these are just so much fun to read that I had to include a lot more of them proportionally. And I'm not even being fair here—most of this is not hate mail at all. It's simply...critical mail of a sort, mail that calls into question stuff we've printed, stuff we've said, just stuff in general....

Some of our earliest critiques centered around our format change. For the first three years of our existence (1984–1986), we had a very simple newsletter format. In 1987 we changed our size, added pages and binding, and started having covers. In 1988 we enlarged our size and changed to the current quarterly schedule. But even in the hacker world, any sort of a change brings resistance, and we had quite a bit of that at first. And we did wind up making changes when we realized we were wrong, such as when we were sending out the magazines without envelopes for a brief period. It was a learning experience for us too, after all.

As we grew and became more well known, the inevitable disenchantment was voiced by a number of readers in their letters. Some of these were nothing more than gentle admonitions. Others were...well, you'll see. I'd hate to ruin the surprise.

There's really an ...