Autumn:  The Autumn 1997 cover was much more significant than it appeared.

A sideways image of a crowd of morning commuters coming up an escalator (left) and stairs (right) seemed an odd choice for the front of a hacker magazine.

The escalator happened to be at New York's Citicorp Center, where the monthly 2600 meetings were held.  And if you look at the LED signs on the ceiling (that could only be seen when heading down), you can see that the one on the left says "The Hacker Quarterly" and the one on the right says "Volume Fourteen, Number Three".

Since we had done quite a bit of photo manipulation in recent issues, most people assumed this was just another example of that when, in fact, there was not one bit of alteration to the photo.  The LED signs were modified in the overnight areas to display those very messages.  (Only an infrared keyboard was needed with no password required.)

Now, as to the significance of this particular message, this little incident occurred after our distributor had gone bankrupt and taken nearly an entire year's worth of our earnings with them.  It became almost impossible for us to put out another issue and our future was very much in jeopardy.  When we started to emerge from the darkness, months past our original deadline, we wanted to send a message to our readers that we were still here and planning a new issue.

For some reason, it was incredibly easy to get the local media to cover the "story" of an LED sign at a subway station getting hacked; they seemed to think it was the same thing as the subway itself being hacked.  So, on October 23, 1997, the story was on all of the evening newscasts in New York and it appeared in newspapers nationwide the next day.  Everyone wondered what "The Hacker Quarterly" and "Volume Fourteen, Number Three" meant - except our readers, who got the message that we were still around and putting together the next issue.

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