2600, The Hacker Quarterly

The object

2600: The Hacker Quarterly was founded in 1984 by Eric Corley, who writes under the pen name "Emmanuel Goldstein", borrowed from the enemy of the state in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its name is the 2600 Hz tone that John Draper ("Captain Crunch") and others had used to seize AT&T's long-distance trunks, a frequency a toy whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal happened to produce. The magazine made that lineage explicit: it printed payphone photographs, network diagrams, exploit write-ups, and political essays, and it sold openly on newsstands across the United States, eventually carried by chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Published from Middle Island, New York, it began as a digest-sized newsletter and grew into a glossy quarterly.

Above ground, on purpose

The radical move was visibility. Where the Hacker Manifesto circulated in the dark of BBSs, 2600 put the same curiosity on paper with an ISSN, a cover price, and a return address. It argued that understanding telephone and computer systems was a literacy, not a crime. And it organized: starting in 1987, the "2600 meetings" became regular gatherings held on the first Friday of every month, in public places (famously the Citicorp Center atrium in midtown Manhattan) and spread to dozens of cities on multiple continents. In 1994 Corley launched the Off the Hook radio show on WBAI in New York, extending the magazine's voice onto the airwaves, and from 1994 the magazine convened the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conferences in New York.

Why it matters

2600 connected the eras this museum collects. It carried the phreakers' technical play into the internet age and repeatedly defended the principle that documenting a system is protected speech. In 2000 the magazine became the defendant in Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, the first major test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, after it published and linked to DeCSS, the program that unscrambled DVD encryption. Corley lost. Judge Lewis Kaplan barred the magazine from even linking to the code, and the Second Circuit upheld the ruling in 2001, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation backing the defense. The case drew the modern boundary between code as expression and code as a tool, the question every security researcher still works within.

The lesson it set loose

A culture survives by publishing in the open, not just whispering in private. By being a magazine, citable, archived, unafraid of its own name, 2600 claimed that hacking was a body of knowledge with a public, and that secrecy was a tactic, never the point. Decades on, it is still printed quarterly, one of the few artifacts in this collection that never went out of print and never went legitimate enough to lose its edge.