the perfect cockpit for zooming through cyberspace

June 7, 2016 12:48 PM

On Reading Issues of Wired from 1993 to 1995, by Anna Wiener
posted by theodolite (55 comments total)

It's no Mondo 2000. :-)

(Good article, thanks for this.)
posted by Artw at 12:57 PM on June 7, 2016 [9 favorites]

I was at a wedding a little while ago, hanging out with a friend from high school that I've seen maybe two or three times in the last fifteen years and we were talking about cyberpunk and while cyberpunk was already pretty old by the time we got to it in the late-90s/early-00s, that conversation in 2016 definitely secured the fact that what we call cyberpunk is very, decidedly retrofuture now instead of just regular-future.

And so these issues of Wired are a beautiful testament to a (retro)future we partially got, and partially did not. I don't think my generation has a lot of genuine nostalgia for the Gernsbackian retrofuture of rocketships and stuff; artistic appreciation, yes, of course, but not nostalgia. Cyberpunk has, apparently, turned into our nostalgia. Watching Hackers, a movie I was pretty okay about as a teen (more nitpicky than anything, really), recently, I was sort of bowled over by the emotional attachment I had to little bits and pieces of the movie: street vendors with pirated software, old laptops, phreaking.

Anyway, the future is always slightly weirder and slightly more boring than we expect it to be. Take activity trackers (FitBit, etc.) for instance: imagine explaining to someone in 1996 that you are pacing around your apartment at 11:53 PM because a small device you carry on your person during waking hours needs to roll over to show 10,000, and this matters because it turns out that just about everyone now plays computerized games in one way or another and "gamification" has turned into a powerful social tool.
posted by griphus at 1:03 PM on June 7, 2016 [29 favorites]

the Clipper CS-1, a tubular, seven-foot-long work station (“the perfect cockpit for zooming through cyberspace”)

I know it would be dorky as hell, but I want one.
posted by Iridic at 1:04 PM on June 7, 2016 [8 favorites]

There's a bar that's always full of programmers which is named "Dear Mom"?

I'm not sure whether that's poignant or laughable.
posted by clawsoon at 1:06 PM on June 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wish this went a bit deeper. Wired was absolutely electrifying when I first read it as an undergrad in 1993 - it was the exact same time that the web launched, with Mosaic. Seeing both gave me the complete certainty you can only get in college (which is, retrospectively, both real and naive) that the world is about to change, and I was going to be part of it.

Because whatever else Wired was (hyperbolic, unreadable thanks to impossible font choices, etc), it wasn't cynical.

I still have the infamous Long Boom issue on my shelf, where it both reminds me that we don't know what will happen (though the article did list terrorism as a risk to end the boom), but that we should also remain optimistic for the future. In that same issue is the still-great article on the Millennium Clock and the need to think for the future:

I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?

...OK, people of the future, here is a part of me that I want to preserve, and maybe the clock is my way of explaining it to you: I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

I have hope for the future.

I later wrote for the magazine a few times as a freelancer, and still subscribe, but it has become more tame over the years, for better or worse. At that moment it was on to Something Important, however, despite its flaws.
posted by blahblahblah at 1:06 PM on June 7, 2016 [25 favorites]

I know it would be dorky as hell, but I want one.

We could all be posting our comments from Battletech pods RIGHT NOW but instead we got standing desks and flextime
posted by theodolite at 1:10 PM on June 7, 2016 [17 favorites]

Wired was absolutely electrifying when I first read it as an undergrad in 1993

I was working in the nascent website industry in 1995 in the UK and we all raised our eyebrows yeah right at the 'tech bollocks' stuff our managers were speaking about how everything was going to be digital, like your bank and your shopping and your newspaper. If I'd invested my money and time in those days how Wired said I should, I might be rich and happy now.
posted by Coda Tronca at 1:15 PM on June 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

This reminds me that I have been meaning to go up to the attic and dig out my old copies of Enter magazine, which was sort of like Wired for nerdy kids in the early-mid 1980s. It was pretty much my only childhood lifeline to the larger world of computers and programming during its criminally short run.
posted by usonian at 1:16 PM on June 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

I remember one of the first issues of Wired had, in small text in the margin of an article, the IP and port number of a MUSH that somebody there liked. Wired had this amazing (and I think blahblahblah nails it as "undergraduate") enthusiasm, and it was hard not to love it. It's almost entirely unrelated to what it eventually became.

If like me you're a junkie like this kind of optimistic not-hedging-your-bets enthusiasm, I recommend digging up a copy of Steven Levy's almost forgotten "Artificial Life", which, when he wrote it, I'm sure seemed a perfect candidate for The Next Big Thing, and now reads like breathless reporting from an alternate timeline.
posted by phooky at 1:17 PM on June 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

I had an inordinate love for the "Hacker Tourist" columns, and really wanted to do cool things like that. Now, I don't know, I travel enough for work that it's not really exotic, it's just exhausting. Also, I still never seem to have half of the adapters I need and hotel WiFi the world over is terrible.
posted by wintermind at 1:29 PM on June 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

I just binned about the first 20 issues a month back.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 1:37 PM on June 7, 2016

I don't think I started reading Wired until '97 or thereabouts, but I was a 12-year-old middle-class girl in suburban Los Angeles at the time and the magazine felt like it was mailed from another damn planet. I do feel like between that and reading everything I could find on the internet about what "hackers" were like, I brought myself up to be a part of a sixties-counterculture-spawned tech culture that unbeknownst to me was rapidly becoming extinct or at least irrelevant; I often feel like I have more in common with my colleagues who are 10+ years older than I am because while I didn't know how to teach myself to code productively, I did a lot of reading about what tech culture was like so I'd be able to fit in once I got there.

Once I did, I discovered there were very few people in the computer science department who had the same ideas about what technology was for that I did. I adjusted, but it wasn't fun. Lots of people had or wanted the expensive toys from the beginning of each issue of Wired but it turned out most of them weren't flipping to the back to read the articles.
posted by town of cats at 1:39 PM on June 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

Anybody else here miss 8pt orange text on lime green background printed sideways up the margin?
posted by hal9k at 1:46 PM on June 7, 2016 [18 favorites]

Wired was the first place I ever saw a URL. A programmer friend had a copy of it laying around and I looked at it. I had a vague notion that it was kind of like an email address, only for a place to go to on-line, but I didn't quite know how you did that until about a year later.

At one time, Wired was, well, wired. Now it's kind of tired.
posted by bondcliff at 1:49 PM on June 7, 2016

A friend of my dad's used to give me issues ca. 1993/94/95, and I devoured them cover to cover. Never had internet until I went to college in 1995, so I had to sort of fill in the meaning of all the terms, but they never failed to hit the interesting rave-tech-cyber culture stuff.

I remember one piece about a pave-the-earth Usenet group?
posted by migurski at 1:51 PM on June 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?

Derail, but:

That story is beloved in Whole Earth Catalog circles (Wired is a direct descendant) - unfortunately, it's not true:

The great hall in Oxford Cameron was referring to appears to be that at New College and the story one that gained prominence when narrated by Stewart Brand on his TV series How Buildings Learn. It was subsequently deployed by others as a pleasant illustration of the value of foresight. The only problem is that the New College story appears to be false, or as the college's archivist Jennifer Thorp put it back in 2008, in an essay about the tale, a "myth".

She told the Guardian on Wednesday: "The New Buckinghamshire estates from which these trees were supposed to have come had not actually been acquired by us 500 years before the trees were needed. To have earmarked trees specifically for a chamber does not make any sense."
posted by ryanshepard at 1:51 PM on June 7, 2016 [9 favorites]

What are some other magazines like the old school Wired? We've got Mondo 2000 and Enter mentioned in this thread. What else?
posted by I-baLL at 1:56 PM on June 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm remembering there was some sort of long-dead spinoff/parody in the late 90's at "tired.co.uk"... related to ntk.net, maybe?
posted by phooky at 2:12 PM on June 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

/pours one out for NTK.
posted by Artw at 2:19 PM on June 7, 2016 [8 favorites]

What are some other magazines like the old school Wired? We've got Mondo 2000 and Enter mentioned in this thread. What else?

OMNI magazine probably fits the bill, too.

Edit: Doesn't look like that full archive is online anymore; omni.media doesn't have it either
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:35 PM on June 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

What are some other magazines...

Boing Boing started as a zine and got glossier before it turned into a website.

Before it became Mondo 2000, R.U. Sirius had published High Frontiers and Reality Hackers. But as RU writes in a new essay from the Mondo 2000 History Project, he also hoped to turn the 'zine into a commercially-sustainable venture supported in part by tech company ads. After all, "acid dealers didn't advertise."

I suppose we could lump Whole Earth Review in there.
posted by larrybob at 2:37 PM on June 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

2600

If I remember correctly, Wired also had a decidedly libertarian bent back when.
posted by destro at 2:38 PM on June 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Starlog
posted by zippy at 2:40 PM on June 7, 2016

I'm thinking RAW and Leary and the Subgenius guys, but really that crossover is more at the Mondo end of things.
posted by Artw at 2:42 PM on June 7, 2016

2600 walked Wired's talk.
posted by GuyZero at 2:46 PM on June 7, 2016 [7 favorites]

I know it would be dorky as hell, but I want one.

My god, yes. I live in a 3-bedroom house with my partner and our four children. My office is the tiny space that is supposed to be a dining nook, which means it's continuous with the living room. That Clipper thing is like a Tiny House for inside your house; it creates this tent-like sense of dividing the space and creating at least the illusion of privacy. I could totally go for a thing like this.
posted by not that girl at 3:01 PM on June 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh really, Mondo2K has a party and the haters come out but someone's stack of Wired gets glanced at in the dumpster and it's Ooohhhh Wired, yeah good times.. Pffft.

What the hell MeFi, what happened to you man? You used to be cool. I got yer Wired nostalgia right hereZIPPIE CUECAT Y2K buncha moneyzoned imitation wankers playing with the Font menu for me to poop on.

Every issue - for years - I'd begrudgingly get because . . because M2K was gone okay - no, I'm *snf* . . . I'm okay . . . and every issue I'd grumble in disgust at until, inevitably, there'd be some cool well-written longform piece on something sort of random-sciencey and I'd sigh and give them One. More. Chance. Until I didn't. Wired. And they woulda gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for us meddling kids!

"How Sega's going to take over the world"? Please.
posted by petebest at 3:12 PM on June 7, 2016 [11 favorites]

We'll always have R U A CYBERPUNK?
posted by Artw at 3:29 PM on June 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Anybody else here miss 8pt orange text on lime green background printed sideways up the margin?

I vaguely remember a series of Doonesbury strips where Mike Doonesbury's startup developed software to translate Wired Magazine into something actually readable.
posted by Eikonaut at 3:34 PM on June 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

On the "what other magazines?" tip, aside from Mondo 2000 and Wired, the other one that made my tech child head swim was Pixel Vision.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 4:09 PM on June 7, 2016

Patrick Farley was there too.
posted by Bringer Tom at 4:14 PM on June 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Where's that wired one page about the various wearable computer hardware you could combine in to one unit of awesome from like 94-95? Because that was the shit when i was like 7-9 and super nerdy. I built my first website from bad basic HTML in notepad in about 97, and i remember paging through backissues of wired and going "WOAHHHH" at stuff like that, and wondering what the future would be like.

I second that aesthetic being combined with hackers(which i watched a ton of times in 5th-7th grade) is exactly what i think of when i think of tech in the 90s. Bricky laptops and all.
posted by emptythought at 4:50 PM on June 7, 2016

What are some other magazines like the old school Wired?

Funny that the article doesn't mention HotWired (1994).

Comparable in some ways: Adbusters (anti-comsumerist, 1989), Audion (music, 1986), huH (1994, music), Vice (1994), and 'CD-ROM magazine' Blender (1994).
(I wonder: will Blender, and/or its ilk, still run on any modern OS?).

Online, of course, Internet Underground (1995), which bears a strong resemblance.
posted by Twang at 5:28 PM on June 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

I started reading Wired in 1994. I was so seduced by its vision of the future that I moved to San Francisco in 1998 for the express purpose of working at Wired—a plan which amazingly succeeded. Turned out that was around the time that Silicon Valley started pivoting away from its utopian dreams and towards being the new hotness in business. Eventually Wired stopped concentrating so much on amazing potential futures and more on lucrative startups of the present (and the mainstreaming of geek culture). By the time I left Wired it was almost unrecognizable, and looking at new issues now is (for me) like perusing the Instagram of an ex I'm embarrassed that I used to date. Thats's not a comment on its current quality, just on how much we've both changed in 20 years. I miss that future of the past.
posted by ejs at 6:38 PM on June 7, 2016 [14 favorites]

OMNI magazine probably fits the bill, too.

Best summer vacation: arrived at a cottage, found a big stack of old Omni's in a corner. Good times.
posted by ovvl at 6:54 PM on June 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

That Clipper thing is like a Tiny House for inside your house;

Yo Dawg.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:27 PM on June 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

(I wonder: will Blender, and/or its ilk, still run on any modern OS?).

I tried installing my Peter Gabriel Xplora CD-ROM on a Windows laptop about 10 years ago, just to see if it would still make show......it overwrote like Quicktime and maybe some other dlls...maybe DirectX also took some hit points. I don't remember even getting it to run.
posted by thelonius at 7:48 PM on June 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

wrt Stewart Brand, Mondo 2000 and RS Sirius, and Boing Boing and Mark Frauenfelder: iirc, all three gents actually did work for Wired in the mag's first five years, and I think I remember Mark writing about working with Sirius in an essay some years back. Not sure if Brand was ever a direct employee the way that the other guys were, but Mark's also unambiguously written about how Brand's work and vision shaped his worldview and career.
posted by mwhybark at 8:32 PM on June 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

John Dvorak wanted to compete with Wired and convinced Ziff Davis to produce PC/Computing, but it was never all that good, garish, cheaper graphics and cheap slick paper, etc.

That oak tree anecdote attributed to Brand was actually told to him by Gregory Bateson, I seem to recall.

You teens, tweens, undergraduates, et al., don't have to feel self-conscious; I was already a freaking middle-aged man and I believed also! So did others! It was in the goddamed air! We wuz robbed, somehow.
posted by Chitownfats at 8:57 PM on June 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

i have a paper collection of my early years of Wired, 1 through 7 or so. Threw away the rest. But the earlier ones are nice to look at, esp with all the silver/gold ink. It is weird seeing how how some things have changed, others have just got new stylings. Probably because I read them through the first time, I guess it doesn't seem so alien.

Going back to an earlier generations' tech magazines is instructive. It's difficult to get more 1980s than this, but in 1989 or so, I read all the Byte Magazines from the 1970s and then did a huge HyperCard stack of stuff from them for a compsci project. Even though it was only a decade or so earlier, the tech from the 1970s just felt so foreign and weird to me - weird names like Cromemco and IMSAI, etc, and computers with 1970s curves in wood grain plastic.
posted by meehawl at 10:01 PM on June 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

computers with 1970s curves in wood grain plastic

It's like the weird future in Blakes 7, where everything is hardware. No software to be seen.

I remember thinking Wired was pretty silly at the time, but, looking back, it was just a somewhat more juvenile version of the vision I had of the future. Alas.
posted by praemunire at 10:21 PM on June 7, 2016

I still have the first 100 or so issues of Wired in paper and all of those ads are fantastic....
posted by mfoight at 5:42 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I dearly miss the tech optimism of those days, but seeing the dire consequences for us all over how so many of those hoped-for ideas turned out makes it really difficult to get excited about all the new ones to come.

(I too have a stack of the original Wireds, though, and even with my modern cynicism there is an awful lot of joy at continually being reminded that we live in the future. That promised fingernail-sized storage big enough to hold hundreds of encyclopaedias? It's here! And we don't care because everything's on the cloud anyway)
posted by bonaldi at 8:25 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've got a bunch in my closet somewhere. I loved the 8pt orange font on a lime green background! It was like a fancy zine on nice paper. Who cares if it's readable? This was PUNK ROCK.

Then about two years in they did an issue that was all black and white and it was like, whoa.
posted by fungible at 8:32 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

How fast are you? How dense?

(also have an almost-full run of Mondo along with first few years of Wired in the charmingly retro medium of paper. also miss the mood of the early/mid '90s even as I love the realization of at least some of those tech dreams.)
posted by the sobsister at 10:55 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

If I'd invested my money and time in those days how Wired said I should, I might be rich and happy now.

Naah, you would've sold your Apple stock to invest in Gateway, AOL and push technology companies.

That oak tree anecdote attributed to Brand was actually told to him by Gregory Bateson, I seem to recall.

I wonder if that was a garbled anecdote about investing in oak forests to keep England's fleet strong.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:24 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I find that Make Magazine kind of pushes the same sort of buttons in a 21st-century way.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:27 AM on June 8, 2016

The buttons of despair in tech's lack of imagination and fealty to capitalism? Yeah, me too.
posted by dame at 12:02 PM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ugh, I am sorry, that was more flip than I meant it to be. My thesis is on the circumscription of imagination in tech, mostly linked to its roots in the fake-expansive utopianism of people like Brand and engineering's colonialist core and it just makes me sad. I want to know what we would have now if we had a culture around tech that was broader and open to more streams of thought, and I see Make making the same kind of content and I despair.
posted by dame at 12:07 PM on June 8, 2016

Anybody else here miss 8pt orange text on lime green background printed sideways up the margin?

I worked at Adobe during the '90s. Professional Print products. We used to love figuring out how many solid speciality inks it took to print each month's cover. Sometimes it was as many as seven. Plus maybe a varnish. Those things were very expensive.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:41 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Pour another one out for Template Gothic Bold
posted by rhizome at 4:47 PM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think the core problem with WIRED was pretty explicitly mentioned in the article. Here's a new medium that can change the world for anyone for almost no cost whatsoever, but we're going to target high-earning bourgeois dudes. It grated on me at the time, and it still grates on me now.
posted by eschatfische at 7:12 PM on June 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

Well, that and everyone reads their phones instead of magazines now.
posted by Artw at 7:13 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, Wired was the least gay magazine published in San Francisco since the one Brooke Shields worked at in Suddenly Susan.
posted by larrybob at 8:28 PM on June 9, 2016

I think the core problem with WIRED was pretty explicitly mentioned in the article. Here's a new medium that can change the world for anyone for almost no cost whatsoever, but we're going to target high-earning bourgeois dudes. It grated on me at the time, and it still grates on me now.

The early issues were not that at all. Just like Mondo2000 it was about the democratization of technology. The ability to empower. The web was a many-to-many medium without the gatekeeper mentality of print publishing.
Of course, it appealed to the well-heeled geek, because all that gear wasn't cheap. And with the dot.com boom, Conde Nast took notice, snapped up Wired and applied the glossy magazine mentality to the marketing team.
posted by exparrot at 5:43 AM on June 10, 2016