Wired 1.1: An Archaeology

What a wonderful post.

I love/have loved Wired like no other magazine - in truth I've never been a deep magazine guy. In other words, I've always tend to flip and find my info in snippets - tiny little pieces of writing and then move onto the next thing.

Wired always was/is different. I'm not sure why.

I don't remember this specific issue but I do remember first finding it and thinking *shit* this is about all the crap I've been thinking about.

And that was a nice feeling.

Super-super-awesome piece, Rex. I love a) the masthead full of now-even-more-famous names (what's the current equivalent? what masthead, online or off, presages the future?) and b) the ads.

Thanks for this. I actually still remember seeing a TV ad for Wired before the first issue came out (how did they afford that? I don't know). I had the first issue when it came out, but ruined it by highlighting all the interesting bits with marker. Of course, I was 13 and had no idea what kind of collectible I had.

Now I only read Wired when I'm on a plane. The long-form articles still seem to be pretty good, but the rest is a bit dull.

The Colophon was one of my favorite parts of the magazine as well!

And, personally, I think you are doing the design work of John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr a bit of a disservice by comparing their work to a Pat Benetar video. Yes, it looks a little dated now, but it was striking back then. Plus, they were doing AMAZING things with spot colors and print techniques. Yes, the neon stuff was overplayed, but their pre-press and production art was second to none, IMHO. What is commonplace now in graphic design and print production, they were doing with what amounted to sticks and stone tablets. I worked in pre-press and a color houses in the 90s and Wired always blew me away with what they were able to pull off.

Great article, though! Thank you. We recently re-modeled and I found my trove of ancient Wireds. That was a fun afternoon, thumbing through that past.

My other favorite section (from slightly later): hURL!

Hey, not to be too blowing of horn, mine, but you left out my little contribution to Wired 1. The sex element.

"This is a Naked Lady"

It's over here:

http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/this_is_a_naked.php



Interesting stuff. Where to get a copy?

My introduction to Wired was a free copy of issue 1.3 at Comdex in 1993. It featured Sonic the Hedgehog on the cover. I've stuck with the thing through the irrational exuberance of the late 90s, and the exploding bubble of soon after. I find that I enjoy it just the same today as I did then.

@jon: Yeah, I should have spent more time talking about the design stuff. You're right -- the design did all sorts of interesting things. The two sub-points I was trying to make: 1) design doesn't age well and 2) the incendiary design that we know as the Wired style didn't really emerge until a few issues into flight.

@vanderleun: You're right! I started to write about that too, but cut it because it was getting too long.

Nice job, Rex. Part euology, part criticism -- both well done. I confess to having an almost complete set of Wireds right from the first issue to the mid-1990s, which my wife gets mad at me for lugging around every time we move. I still remember that rush that came from getting a new issue. Now I hardly read print magazines at all, whether it's Wired or anything else.

Re: "debates about 1080 vs. 760" -- I reckon it should be 720.

Otherwise as a relatively new Wired reader (I thought the magazine looked the same in 2005 as it had in 1995 when I first heard of it) all I can say is: excellent piece.

@OlliS Oops, yep, thanks for the typo fix.

One of the funnier tidbits about that issue (which I still have sitting on a shelf) is that NN's back-page essay is addressed from "nicholas @ internet"  Wired didn't trust us to understand e-mail addresses in issue 1.1. They published a real (real-looking, anyhow) address in 1.2 though.

@Rex: Thank you for this post.

@Doug: Sonic was on the cover of 1.6:

http://www.wired.com/wired/coverbrowser/1993

Speaking of 1.3, does anyone remember seeing multiple covers? Wired's cover browser shows the Peter Gabriel cover, but I ended up buying a second copy of 1.3 with Mitch Kapor on the cover thinking it was a new issue!

Never cut the sex, Rex.

For me, Wired took the place of Omni. When I was a kid, I had an Omni magazine subscription - back when it was very large and full of great stuff about the future. Of course, it died a slow, painful death. Wired kind of filled that part of me that wanted exuberant futurism and cool geeky current events.

It's had ups and downs, but it's still the first magazine I reach for at the airport.

great post. Yet Another Wired Reader.

Ooh, whenever you write a long piece, feel free to send it to me. If I saw this last night I would have put it on Gawker.

1983: I was wearing a cheap suit, standing around a CES booth full of cheap CD multimedia software, when the WIRED folks came around and set up a dump across the aisle. A dump full of free copies of Wired #1.

As an EFF member, sci-fi nerd, and Whole Earth Review reader I knew who Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Negreponte, and Stewart Brand were. Seeing 'em all in one place, in a slick magazine . . . wow.

It was immensely validating. I'd been babbling to my co-workers about Ted Nelson's Xanadu and the Internet and cyberspace for years. Here was a zine that not only talked about that stuff, but cast it all as vitally important.

Validating, and humiliating. The world finally seemed to be catching on, and here I was in a cheap suit, demonstrating CDs with badly scanned childrens' books and third-rate family encyclopedias on them. I started taking CS classes the following fall, and looking around for grad school programs.

I arranged for a dump for our booth, and went home with maybe a dozen copies crammed in my luggage.

Duh. That should be 1993.

Brings back memories. In fact I have a copy of that issue here at work that I kept since it was the very first. I also have been a subscriber since very early on and have every single issue. The sad thing is that I hardly have time to read them anymore but the subscription is so cheap I keep renewing. It kind of sucks that about a year or so ago they switched to a more narrow traditional magazine size.


"Sorgatz." What kind of name is that ? They stole the whole thing, topics, editorial stance and, most importantly, the innovate graphic look of Wired from Mondo 2000 magazine. You overpaid illiterate ahistorical numb nutsz

Great article. Whilst doing a clear out a couple of years back I could not entertain the thought of throwing my copies away. I also have all copies, bar one, of the short lived UK only version.

The Nicholas Negroponte predictions about HD aren't that outlandish. People download encoded TV, buy pirate DVDs and watch video on their iPods.

Wired was the shit back then. I loved this magazine so much, every issue had mind-blowing articles - and mind-blowing designs that sometimes made it hard to read said articles. It was fantastic.

Then in the late 90ies it became a sellout dotcom mag, as idiotic as $50M of funding for pets.com.
And after the dotcom era it became a boring wishy washy rag. It's old. Wired aged faster than the rest of us.

One thing remained steady: I never liked Negroponte's articles. Never found his ideas interesting or practical.

Stacks & stacks of Wired 1.01 were distributed for free at the 1993 CES. I recall thinking at the time that Negroponte's backpage jab at Hi-Def TV was just an envious snark at all the HD monitors (CRTs) seen at the CES. By 93 HD broadcasting was already old hat in japan.

My first issue was the one with William Gibson on the cover (1.2?). I picked it up at WaldenBooks (!). His picture and the cover headlines were enough; I bought it without even opening it and subscribed the next day.

I knew they were on to something when I noticed that many of the tech stories I hear or read about in the mainstream media, or that came up in conversations with coworkers, were ideas I had just read about in Wired. They had to be at least six months ahead of the curve!

Still the only magazine I read all the way through, cover to cover.

I started reading Wired sometime in the first few issues - it had to be 1993, because I was a senior in high school.

My favorite article is still the one about underground tunnels at various universities. Because of it, I ended up with a "work study" job in college and access to all the old buildings and spaces used for storage.

I think I hear either Pearl Jam or Nirvana playing faintly in the background of this story.

My Vibe mag took up too much room (because of the large format) for me to save all my Wired issues.

I still have mine, dunno why I kept it but I did. Maybe because back in that day I collected comic books, and if I saw a first issue of anything I had to buy it.

As a design student at the time the colophon was always insightful. I would also shout for the letters page which were always entertaining and their feature of pics of the oddball envelopes they would arrive. I stopped buying the magazine when the ad count just got absurd. Especially the splicing up of long articles between ads and too many multiple "continued on page 56, 78, 23, 123" etc.,
I'd be interested to see a height comparison after 15yrs - in the left pile the content and the right all the ads...

Hey man,

As a lifelong WIRED reader... who is now a WIRED editor, I really appreciate this post. You really captured what it was all about, and what we keep striving to do. Thanks!

Of course, a ScanJet IIc wasn't a printer at all, but a flatbed scanner.

The Urban Stampede in downtown Grand Forks, ND?

ooh, whenever you write a long post be sure to not send it to the lazy blogger who can't be bothered to add your rss feed to his bloglines.

Don't be so hard on Nicholas about his statements about HD in 93. He was right on the money. He was mostly arguing a point against ANALOG HD standards like HD-MAC. He might not have predicted that everyone would go out and buy an HD set 15 years later, but he might have saved a lot of people from throwing out their useless analog HD sets in 1997.


Truly excellent post. I had completely forgotten the colophon but I loved it as well.
The best part about Wired was in it's heyday, you got free things - such as the long forgotten Cue Cat (Which I still have, branded with WIRED on it's end) and an American Express smart card reader when they started embedding smart chips into their cards.

Though I really haven't paid much attention to it for the past several years, it was a good one.

I got turned on to Wired at issue 1.3 and have read every word published since. I credit it with nursing me into the Internet age and keeping me informed on everything technocultural. It has fueled and informed countless intelligent conversations for me. Now my 11-year-old son has caught on and he snags the latest issues from the mail pile before I get home from work and I dont get to read it until he has digested it fully. I think Im going to have to get him his own subscription.

Rex, I have followed your blog for many years. When I started seeing your pieces appear in the pages of Wired it made me realize why I was drawn to your site in the first place. Affirmation of your coolness. Way to go.


@Scott
I too was raised on Omni and am glad someone else has made the connection. I don't remember if they stopped publishing it first or if it just became too "Area 51" for me but for many years it sparked my imagination for futurism and technology. Then Wired came along years later and totally filled that gap for me (albeit with more credibility). Wired's use of experimental graphics and typography as well as their overall design concept owes much to Omni. I miss the science fiction stories and book excerpts but Wired clearly has enjoyed greater cultural relevance.


I used to keep all of my back issues of Wired in a stack on the closet floor -- until Wired.com came along and made all the content available on line. Though I never went back into the old issues I kind of wish I had kept them for posterity's sake. I also now realize that Wired magazine is about more than just the content -- it's also about form and design.

Terrific write-up.

> Wired didn't even bother with a Beta release.

Actually, what Louis and Jane were doing in Holland was publishing a nearly forgotten text-heavy magazine called "Electric Word". They took the groundbreaking attitude that instead of writing about printers, monitors, and software, they would write about the cool things people were doing with them. They folded the magazine after about a year, moved back to the States, found some funding, a major distributor, and that look, and the rest is history.

For those of us with (slight) visual impairment, Wired was, and is, unreadable. Black type on blue, red type on orange, etc. No amount of additional light, enlargement, etc, compensates for their design idiosyncracies. It is very, very poor design from my view.

sigh... brings back lots of memories. Great article, thanks!

I got the first issue of Wired when they were handing them out at MacWorld in 93. I had been at Apple for less than a year at that time and this magazine hit me like nothing else before or since. I may have read more Wired Magazines than any other Magazine...

That MacWorld is also when I was given a copy of Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash as a handout by a game company. Those two influences had a huge impact on that part of my life.

I still have that promotional paperback but my first copy of Wired was read to death. I am missing a lot of the early Wireds because I used to fold them in half and stick them in the vest pocket of my jacket so I would always have something to read.