The Tone That Named a Movement
In the early days of AT&T's phone network, long-distance calls were routed using in-band signaling — control tones sent on the same line as the voice. A 2600 Hz tone played into a payphone told the switching equipment the line was idle, allowing a caller to seize trunk lines before billing began. This became the foundation of "phone phreaking" — hacking telephone infrastructure using audio signals.
The name of the magazine is not a version number or a hex value. It is a reference to that tone.
Joe Engressia and Captain Crunch
Joe Engressia was a blind child prodigy with perfect pitch who discovered in 1965 that whistling at 2600 Hz could disconnect phone calls. He later legally changed his name to Joybubbles and became a celebrated figure in phone phreak folklore.
John Draper — known as Captain Crunch — discovered that the toy whistle included in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes of the 1970s produced exactly 2600 Hz. He used it to make free international calls and was arrested multiple times under federal wire fraud statutes. Draper served time in federal prison and later contributed code to early Apple computers.
“If you can make a device that can do the same thing as a coin, why pay for the call?” — John Draper
The Magazine
On January 1, 1984, Emanuel Goldstein — real name Eric Corley — published the first issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The name was chosen in direct homage to the phone phreak tradition. Goldstein has edited every issue since. The magazine covers security vulnerabilities, civil liberties, system exploitation, and hacker culture at large.
Unlike most technical publications, 2600 was sold openly at newsstands — Barnes & Noble, Tower Records, independent bookstores. The editorial stance was consistently that information itself is not a crime and that curiosity about systems is not inherently malicious.
The DeCSS Case
In 1999, 2600 published and linked to DeCSS — a program that could decrypt the CSS scrambling on DVDs, necessary for Linux playback. The MPAA sued in 2000 under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The case, Universal City Studios v. Corley, was decided against 2600. The court found that DeCSS was a "circumvention device" and that publishing links to it constituted trafficking. The ruling is still cited in DMCA case law. Corley continued publishing.
Off The Hook and HOPE
2600 also produces Off The Hook, a weekly radio show broadcast on WBAI New York since 1988 — covering phone networks, security news, and hacker culture. The magazine runs the HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference, held periodically in New York City since 1994.
The magazine still prints quarterly on paper. As of 2025, it is one of the longest-running print publications covering hacking and security — 41 years from a field that barely existed when it launched.