The first issue was penned by me alone, and almost entirely on a road-trip with my parents, on my old NEC Versa 550D while sitting in the back seat of a powder-blue 1989 Ford Aerostar for hours on end. I was just a kid. Going back and reading some of my older stuff is sometimes embarrassing.
A few months later, I had friends from local BBSes submitting content - Frogman being one of them. Soon thereafter, I'd run into a reader of HiR in a college class -- Asmodian X, who also had plenty of fascinating things to add. Contributors came and went, and I'd answer some e-mail questions. I still keep in touch with some of the past contributors and commenters.
From 2001-2007, HiR faded in and out and was mostly dormant. I got busy. We all got busy. The core contributors all grew up, in one way or another. We'd come up with one or two interesting articles, and think maybe we should put together a new "issue" of HiR.
Even though we all live fairly close, that never happened.
In early 2007, we decided to go with a "blog" format. I think it works better. We write when we get a chance, and the comments section gets us closer to our readers. We changed the name, mostly to shed the "hacker" from our name -- I think most of us have long given up hope of completely reclaiming "hacker" as a good word in all use cases. Now it's just a recursive acronym: HiR Information Report. Why the lower-case i? Partially to encourage HiR to be spelled (like H. i. R.) and partially as a throwback to the uBiQuiToUS LoWeRVoWeLiNG of the 1990s. Can we leave that part behind us?
Some months, we really hammer out the content and muster up a post nearly every single day. Other months, we're all but silent. We're still busy, but we are still passionate. Also, in the last year, we've had a pair of really great guest posts. We hope to have more of these, and maybe even land a few more regular contributors.
At any rate, this is me saying "thanks" to those who've contributed to our journey, on behalf of the entire HiR crew. The co-writers. The guest posters. The commenters. The friends who have been around with us for what seems like an eternity in Internet years -- tossing us link-love even back in the 90s. (Lookin' at you, HNNCast), the folks who still archive our mess of old text files (yes you can find us there, no I'm not linking to it), the folks who have kicked it with us at meetups, cons and user groups. And, of course, the readers, without whom we'd probably have given up on this little project long ago.
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