Ben Sherman had mentioned a few times he had a bunch of old magazines for me.  This past week, he dropped them off.

Ben has been on the staff of 2600 magazine for some time, and of course has collected his own stuff over the years. So I didn’t entirely know what I was getting, except that it was likely going to have some issues of 2600 magazine in there.

I didn’t expect to get all of them.

Now you know what every issue of 2600 might look like. This would be every issue from January 1984 (the premiere issue), appearing quarterly, up through the early 2000s. Since I already have the issues as of late, this means I basically have all the hard to get issues, the rare early ones, and specimens of all other sorts. This also includes a few draft copies, some one-off printing oddities, and other such goodness.

So that’s handled.

The rest of the collection is very interesting as well, as it contains a whole lot of stuff in the hacking/phreaking vein, almost as if they were trade-off copies for 2600 issues. I don’t know if that’s the case, or if it’s just overlapping interest, but there’s definitely some sort of punk/mediaprankery/phonefun/etc thing going on:

Issues in here include Iron Feather Journal, Fortean Times, Ben is Dead, Factsheet Five, Flipside, BoingBoing (you knew it was a magazine before a website, right?), Film Threat, Adbusters, Comics Journal, Subliminal Tattoos, Maximum Rock N’Roll, Gray Areas, and a bunch more. And that’s even before I get to the half-page zines, which I haven’t even opened up yet.

This is quite a breathtaking set of time, ranging from 1984 up through to about 2000, a sort of suburban kid’s lifeline 0f weird words, unusual pictures, and crazy promises that someone might be able to live up to if they ran far and fast enough in the right direction. At the very least, they might have a bunch of really strange references to connect with others in adulthood.

A great addition – thanks, Ben.

Categorised as: computer history

Comments are disabled on this post