Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600

INTRODUCTION

After we put out The Best of 2600 — a nearly 900-page collection of some of our best articles of the last quarter century — in 2008, you might be wondering how another large book has come to be published so quickly. It's an interesting story. In fact, the answer might surprise and even enrage you.

The fact of the matter is that all of that material, informative and provocative as it was, didn't comprise a single character of what has always been the most popular part of the magazine. Don't get me wrong—the articles have always been our backbone, and they have turned a great number of heads and caused a fair amount of whiplash over the years. We would be nothing without them. They endure to this day, and so much of our technology—and even bits of our society — has been irrevocably changed as a result of their publication. But...there's more. A rather significant amount, actually.

Any decent magazine has a variety of sections and/or features. And while articles represent the semiformal presentations of our writers on their particular fields of expertise, we had another somewhat more informal forum for those who just needed to get something off their chest or ask a quick question. I refer to the letters of 2600.

I'm not entirely sure when we realized that this thing was taking on a life of its own. It was definitely within our debut year (1984). In fact, our very first letter was published in our second issue and, within a few months, letters to the editor had become a regular ...