12 ms·

On Reading Issues of Wired from 1993 to 1995

99 points by kawera 10y ago

gr3yh47 10y ago
somebody from wired should do the same with the new yorker
lafay 10y ago
This article is by Anna Wiener, the same author who wrote the recent "Uncanny Valley" piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691 Really enjoy her writing.
GnarfGnarf 10y ago
Wired used to be a really interesting magazine. Now it's just a dumbed-down catalog of high-tech gadgets. Like a SkyMall catalog.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I'm not sure it's quite that bad but I was just thinking the other day that I should find out how to turn off the auto-renew that seems to have been turned on at some point. It's a magazine that I get into the house and I find that I'm in no hurry to read it any longer. It still has pretty nice design but I find very little of the content compelling any more. Yeah, there's occasionally a good article but I'm not subscribing to a print magazine for the odd article here and there.
- nabla9 10y ago
  Wired was silly dumbed-down hype-catalog from the start. It looks better in retrospect when we forget that we were dumb, young and inexperienced when it came out. They had few good articles now and then just like they have now, it depends on what kind of writers they have.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  Meh, before the first dotcom meltdown it was a toy catalog as well. I recall a pre-christmas issue in 1998 or 1999 that had to be well over 200 pages thick. It sure wasn't full of articles.
robk 10y ago
The excerpt of Microserfs they published was for me the epitome of 90s silicon valley. Coupland hasn't impressed me since then but damn that was a perfect time capsule
codeulike 10y ago
On a similar note, things found in a 1995 copy of '.Net - The Internet Magazine' http://www.codeulike.com/2008_01_01_archive.html http://www.codeulike.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
ogurechny 10y ago
Let me remind you about the most hip programming language of today: PASCAL. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1978-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1978-08 (There's a lot more there, don't accidentally drown.)
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Meh... ;-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
rconti 10y ago
My favorite was Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth Mother Board", from December 1996, about the Fiber Optic Link around the Globe ("FLAG"). I wish I had all those issues I saved for a decade or so. http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- plucas 10y ago
  I need to read that one. I really enjoyed his "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell" from February '92. http://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/ http://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/
- Yhippa 10y ago
  I remember that thing being super long. Is it really worth going through the whole thing?
  - Tossrock 10y ago
    If you like Neal Stephenson, yes. If you dislike Neal Stephenson, probably not. If neither of the above, could go either way.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Unqualified yes.
muaddirac 10y ago
> DataHand, a two-thousand-dollar sensor-laden, ergonomic “keyboard without keys.” Not as defunct as you might think! See: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=41422.0 https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=41422.0
zeveb 10y ago
> In “Scenarios,” a special edition from 1995, the guest editor Douglas Coupland took it upon himself to compile a “reverse time capsule,” which he deemed “not a capsule directed to the future, but rather to the citizens of 1975.” What artifacts, he asked, “might surprise them most about the direction taken by the next 20 years?” Included in the capsule—alongside non-tech items such as a chunk of the Berlin Wall, Prozac, and a Japanese luxury sedan—were a laptop (“more power in your lap than MIT’s biggest mainframe”), an Apple MessagePad (“hand-held devices are replacing secretaries”), and a cellular phone. Scanning my apartment, I can spot progeny of all three. One suspects that, were we to engineer our own reverse time capsule today and ship it back to the citizens of 1995, they might not be all that surprised by the direction we’ve taken. I remember 1995 pretty well; I think 2016 has a lot more in common with it than 1995 has in common with 1974. Honestly, I don't think life has changed all that much in the last twenty years. Sure, everyone has a smartphone, and back then almost no-one had a _cell_phone, and the Internet is faster, and computers can do more and are more reliable, but things really aren't fundamentally different. We had the Web then, and we have it now. We had internet communities than, and we have them now. We listened to music then, and we listen to it now. Computers have been integrated far better into our lives, but they're doing essentially the same things (I still remember watching a QuickTime video of The Spirit of Christmas back in 1996; that's no different in kind than Hulu or Netflix, just in degree).
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > > One suspects that, were we to engineer our own reverse time capsule today and ship it back to the citizens of 1995, they might not be all that surprised by the direction we’ve taken. Well, yeah, though I think the changes wrought on the average persons way of life from 1995 to 2016 were in some ways greater than 1974 to 1995, the things that have changed the most aren't so much the kind of bits of kit that would go in a reverse time capsule. The ubiquity of digital communication is a huge change, and the software and services that the average person regularly consumes based on them are -- but the bits of kit that we use to access them, at least in outline, wouldn't be all that surprising in 1995. > We had the Web then, and we have it now. We had internet communities than, and we have them now For vastly narrower definitions of "we" in 1995 than in 2016.
rbanffy 10y ago
Wired is for newbies. For a real trip one should try OMNI and Creative Computing.
- fao_ 10y ago
  My parents have a small collection of OMNI they had kept over the years. I've always meant to read through them but forgot when I had the time. Thank you for reminding me.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    My mom had a Fortune subscription for most of my childhood. Both stories and ads provided a surprising perspective of the computer revolution as seen from the management side.
- e12e 10y ago
  I never read Creative Computing as it came out, but there are some issues (along with other magazines) archived at: http://www.atarimagazines.com/ http://www.atarimagazines.com/
patrickg_zill 10y ago
The "original" Wired was written by people well outside mainstream journalism. It was OK for a news piece to be quirky or obscure. When it was taken over by "Encorpera" it changed greatly.
CobrastanJorji 10y ago
> A sidebar on Wacom’s ArtPad, from 1995—“If you’ve ever sketched with a pencil, you’ll be able to use ArtPad”—made me wonder why it took Apple so long to roll out its Pencil stylus for the iPad. Because in 1995, the handwriting recognition of the Apple Newton was so bad that it was a Simpsons joke.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  I don't think the author is talking about the Newton. I think she's pointing out that the iPad was out for years before Apple released a stylus for it. -- Which I think was because His Steveness hated styli. I guess this was because, back in the days of the Palm PDAs, people tended to lose them -- though I never had this problem.
nevster 10y ago
The spines make for interesting patterns: https://www.instagram.com/p/UZdhB/?taken-by=nevrs https://www.instagram.com/p/UZdhB/?taken-by=nevrs (I have every single issue).
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
Ah yes the era of light pink text on a striped yellow background. The future was going to be just like Max Headroom.
jedberg 10y ago
> A few moments later, I was on eBay, where I started to bid on strangers’ dusty collections of early issues of Wired, all from the years 1993 to 1995 It's interesting that the author never tried to get these from a library (or at least doesn't mention it). Do libraries not keep back issues anymore? Growing up in LA, I could get back issues of almost any magazine from the library going many decades back. Sometimes my local library didn't have it, but the LA system did. Also, since she lives in SF, I'll bet should could just head over to Wired HQ and ask to use their collection, and they'd probably be thrilled that someone is interested in back issues. They have them all on a bookcase since the beginning of time. I used to read them when taking breaks.
- itomato 10y ago
  Who wants to carry a year's worth of book-bound magazines around? Nobody can see the neon covers, meaning nobody can appreciate them amid the sea of 'regulars' at Zeitgeist.
- dagw 10y ago
  I'm sure most libraries have them in storage, but perhaps not handily available and they quite possibly won't allow you to take them home. Honestly, if they're easily available on Ebay, that's probably the best solution, if for no other reason than that you'll get to read them in your favorite chair with a glass of wine.
ovt 10y ago
I don't have deep knowledge of what it's like in literary land, literature degree programs, etc., but oh goodness can they blather on, Painting Pictures longer than my interest holds. "on MUNI, at bars, in bed in my apartment in Haight-Ashbury" sounds like someone who came from somewhere regarded as lame and is hoping that coolness is now on them. "it’s a document of a time when consumer technology was still clumsy and undefined" -- I'm not sure consumer technology has reached its pinnacle of perfection. And that's as far as I got. I'd actually been hoping we were going to hear something like "Here is the nonsense of 1994, which lets us think more clearly about what's probably nonsense in 2016", and maybe it's in there somewhere, buried.
mccoyspace 10y ago
And don't forget Mondo 2000. Earlier, more counter-culture and techo-utopian (or maybe dystopian...)
notmything 10y ago
What on earth am I reading? One thing I’ve noticed since moving to San Francisco is that my cohort in the tech world doesn’t talk that much about the industry’s past. How is the above different in any other industry? I don't hear my fellow consultants talking about the history of consulting, I don't hear my programme manager wife and her programme manager friends talking about the history of programme management etc. Waffle
jpeg_hero 10y ago
I was a subscriber since issue 1. I loved that when some issues would arrive, they'd straight up smell like spray paint. I think it was something to do with the metallic paint.
olivermarks 10y ago
I loved 'Uncanny Valley' by Weiner. Wired is one dimension of the mid 90's, Morph's Outpost was another, less corporate one. More Kai's power tools than Adobe.... https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2800394161_32c40ecc6c.jpg https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2800394161_32c40ecc6c.j...
Arzh 10y ago
An alternate take on the history from people who lived through it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaDdLhnIoA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaDdLhnIoA4
ChrisArchitect 10y ago
doh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856835

99 points by kawera 10y ago

somebody from wired should do the same with the new yorker

lafay 10y ago

This article is by Anna Wiener, the same author who wrote the recent "Uncanny Valley" piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691 Really enjoy her writing.

GnarfGnarf 10y ago

Wired used to be a really interesting magazine. Now it's just a dumbed-down catalog of high-tech gadgets. Like a SkyMall catalog.

ghaff 10y ago
I'm not sure it's quite that bad but I was just thinking the other day that I should find out how to turn off the auto-renew that seems to have been turned on at some point. It's a magazine that I get into the house and I find that I'm in no hurry to read it any longer. It still has pretty nice design but I find very little of the content compelling any more. Yeah, there's occasionally a good article but I'm not subscribing to a print magazine for the odd article here and there.
nabla9 10y ago
Wired was silly dumbed-down hype-catalog from the start. It looks better in retrospect when we forget that we were dumb, young and inexperienced when it came out. They had few good articles now and then just like they have now, it depends on what kind of writers they have.
joezydeco 10y ago
Meh, before the first dotcom meltdown it was a toy catalog as well. I recall a pre-christmas issue in 1998 or 1999 that had to be well over 200 pages thick. It sure wasn't full of articles.

robk 10y ago

The excerpt of Microserfs they published was for me the epitome of 90s silicon valley. Coupland hasn't impressed me since then but damn that was a perfect time capsule

codeulike 10y ago

On a similar note, things found in a 1995 copy of '.Net - The Internet Magazine' http://www.codeulike.com/2008_01_01_archive.html http://www.codeulike.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

ogurechny 10y ago

Let me remind you about the most hip programming language of today: PASCAL. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1978-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1978-08 (There's a lot more there, don't accidentally drown.)

rbanffy 10y ago
Meh... ;-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

rconti 10y ago

My favorite was Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth Mother Board", from December 1996, about the Fiber Optic Link around the Globe ("FLAG"). I wish I had all those issues I saved for a decade or so. http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

plucas 10y ago
I need to read that one. I really enjoyed his "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell" from February '92. http://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/ http://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/
Yhippa 10y ago
I remember that thing being super long. Is it really worth going through the whole thing?
- Tossrock 10y ago
  If you like Neal Stephenson, yes. If you dislike Neal Stephenson, probably not. If neither of the above, could go either way.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Unqualified yes.

muaddirac 10y ago

> DataHand, a two-thousand-dollar sensor-laden, ergonomic “keyboard without keys.” Not as defunct as you might think! See: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=41422.0 https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=41422.0

zeveb 10y ago

> In “Scenarios,” a special edition from 1995, the guest editor Douglas Coupland took it upon himself to compile a “reverse time capsule,” which he deemed “not a capsule directed to the future, but rather to the citizens of 1975.” What artifacts, he asked, “might surprise them most about the direction taken by the next 20 years?” Included in the capsule—alongside non-tech items such as a chunk of the Berlin Wall, Prozac, and a Japanese luxury sedan—were a laptop (“more power in your lap than MIT’s biggest mainframe”), an Apple MessagePad (“hand-held devices are replacing secretaries”), and a cellular phone. Scanning my apartment, I can spot progeny of all three. One suspects that, were we to engineer our own reverse time capsule today and ship it back to the citizens of 1995, they might not be all that surprised by the direction we’ve taken. I remember 1995 pretty well; I think 2016 has a lot more in common with it than 1995 has in common with 1974. Honestly, I don't think life has changed all that much in the last twenty years. Sure, everyone has a smartphone, and back then almost no-one had a _cell_phone, and the Internet is faster, and computers can do more and are more reliable, but things really aren't fundamentally different. We had the Web then, and we have it now. We had internet communities than, and we have them now. We listened to music then, and we listen to it now. Computers have been integrated far better into our lives, but they're doing essentially the same things (I still remember watching a QuickTime video of The Spirit of Christmas back in 1996; that's no different in kind than Hulu or Netflix, just in degree).

dragonwriter 10y ago
> > One suspects that, were we to engineer our own reverse time capsule today and ship it back to the citizens of 1995, they might not be all that surprised by the direction we’ve taken. Well, yeah, though I think the changes wrought on the average persons way of life from 1995 to 2016 were in some ways greater than 1974 to 1995, the things that have changed the most aren't so much the kind of bits of kit that would go in a reverse time capsule. The ubiquity of digital communication is a huge change, and the software and services that the average person regularly consumes based on them are -- but the bits of kit that we use to access them, at least in outline, wouldn't be all that surprising in 1995. > We had the Web then, and we have it now. We had internet communities than, and we have them now For vastly narrower definitions of "we" in 1995 than in 2016.

rbanffy 10y ago

Wired is for newbies. For a real trip one should try OMNI and Creative Computing.

fao_ 10y ago
My parents have a small collection of OMNI they had kept over the years. I've always meant to read through them but forgot when I had the time. Thank you for reminding me.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  My mom had a Fortune subscription for most of my childhood. Both stories and ads provided a surprising perspective of the computer revolution as seen from the management side.
e12e 10y ago
I never read Creative Computing as it came out, but there are some issues (along with other magazines) archived at: http://www.atarimagazines.com/ http://www.atarimagazines.com/

patrickg_zill 10y ago

The "original" Wired was written by people well outside mainstream journalism. It was OK for a news piece to be quirky or obscure. When it was taken over by "Encorpera" it changed greatly.

CobrastanJorji 10y ago

> A sidebar on Wacom’s ArtPad, from 1995—“If you’ve ever sketched with a pencil, you’ll be able to use ArtPad”—made me wonder why it took Apple so long to roll out its Pencil stylus for the iPad. Because in 1995, the handwriting recognition of the Apple Newton was so bad that it was a Simpsons joke.

ScottBurson 10y ago
I don't think the author is talking about the Newton. I think she's pointing out that the iPad was out for years before Apple released a stylus for it. -- Which I think was because His Steveness hated styli. I guess this was because, back in the days of the Palm PDAs, people tended to lose them -- though I never had this problem.

nevster 10y ago

The spines make for interesting patterns: https://www.instagram.com/p/UZdhB/?taken-by=nevrs https://www.instagram.com/p/UZdhB/?taken-by=nevrs (I have every single issue).

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

Ah yes the era of light pink text on a striped yellow background. The future was going to be just like Max Headroom.

jedberg 10y ago

> A few moments later, I was on eBay, where I started to bid on strangers’ dusty collections of early issues of Wired, all from the years 1993 to 1995 It's interesting that the author never tried to get these from a library (or at least doesn't mention it). Do libraries not keep back issues anymore? Growing up in LA, I could get back issues of almost any magazine from the library going many decades back. Sometimes my local library didn't have it, but the LA system did. Also, since she lives in SF, I'll bet should could just head over to Wired HQ and ask to use their collection, and they'd probably be thrilled that someone is interested in back issues. They have them all on a bookcase since the beginning of time. I used to read them when taking breaks.

itomato 10y ago
Who wants to carry a year's worth of book-bound magazines around? Nobody can see the neon covers, meaning nobody can appreciate them amid the sea of 'regulars' at Zeitgeist.
dagw 10y ago
I'm sure most libraries have them in storage, but perhaps not handily available and they quite possibly won't allow you to take them home. Honestly, if they're easily available on Ebay, that's probably the best solution, if for no other reason than that you'll get to read them in your favorite chair with a glass of wine.

ovt 10y ago

I don't have deep knowledge of what it's like in literary land, literature degree programs, etc., but oh goodness can they blather on, Painting Pictures longer than my interest holds. "on MUNI, at bars, in bed in my apartment in Haight-Ashbury" sounds like someone who came from somewhere regarded as lame and is hoping that coolness is now on them. "it’s a document of a time when consumer technology was still clumsy and undefined" -- I'm not sure consumer technology has reached its pinnacle of perfection. And that's as far as I got. I'd actually been hoping we were going to hear something like "Here is the nonsense of 1994, which lets us think more clearly about what's probably nonsense in 2016", and maybe it's in there somewhere, buried.

mccoyspace 10y ago

And don't forget Mondo 2000. Earlier, more counter-culture and techo-utopian (or maybe dystopian...)

notmything 10y ago

What on earth am I reading? One thing I’ve noticed since moving to San Francisco is that my cohort in the tech world doesn’t talk that much about the industry’s past. How is the above different in any other industry? I don't hear my fellow consultants talking about the history of consulting, I don't hear my programme manager wife and her programme manager friends talking about the history of programme management etc. Waffle

jpeg_hero 10y ago

I was a subscriber since issue 1. I loved that when some issues would arrive, they'd straight up smell like spray paint. I think it was something to do with the metallic paint.

olivermarks 10y ago

I loved 'Uncanny Valley' by Weiner. Wired is one dimension of the mid 90's, Morph's Outpost was another, less corporate one. More Kai's power tools than Adobe.... https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2800394161_32c40ecc6c.jpg https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2800394161_32c40ecc6c.j...

Arzh 10y ago

An alternate take on the history from people who lived through it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaDdLhnIoA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaDdLhnIoA4

ChrisArchitect 10y ago

doh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11856835