The Whole Earth Catalog was like a preview of the World Wide Web, before the WWW existed. It was the best thing going back then, as far as ways to discover inte

The Whole Earth Catalog was like a preview of the World Wide Web, before the WWW existed. It was the best thing going back then, as far as ways to discover interesting things and, along with its companion publication Coevolution Quarterly (and later Whole Earth Review), ideas. Also as an aside, Kevin Kelly, who is still producing interesting material today (http://kk.org http://kk.org), ran the magazine for a while, during which time he was developing the vision for what became Wired magazine. This was around the time of the software catalogs and in the early days of the Well. There's an edition of the Whole Earth Catalog called "Signal" which was essentially a preview of Wired, before some people with money came in and claimed credit for founding it... I think he is still given credit as a co-founder but he was the visionary and instigator who made it happen. [Edit: I see in his own bio he says: "In 1992 I joined a small team which launched Wired magazine in January 1993." LOL! That's insanely modest. In around Spring of 1987 I sat with him in an office at Whole Earth Review while he described this magazine he wanted to do, a larger format magazine, breaking some size rules, with bright colors, bold, creative layout, and lots of experimentation with creative or just plain abusive typography, focused on tech and the culture around it... Signal had to rely on the older printing technology so it didn't have the color aspects as I recall but the vision he described in that meeting was 100% Wired magazine.]