So, WIRED is turning 15 this month. Happy Birthday, and it makes me feel kinda old, actually.
Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous.com (the link is above) has a nice write-up about the first issue. Here’s a highlight couple of paragraphs for me:
Peeling back those matte pages now, one can’t help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the “Information Superhighway” yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn’t even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Need more historical perspective? There weren’t even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway.
Ah, memories….
I’ve subscribed to Wired off and on for many years now. It went through a phase there during the “dot com” bubble where it was trying to be a business magazine, and it definitely lost its edge. I started taking it again about a year and a half ago, and I guess I have very mixed feelings. I have yet to read the January issue, for example, but the one on Manga was pretty good. It all just goes to show you that institutions/publications/etc. can’t remain “the cutting edge” forever.