Kevin Kelly on the history of Wired
Wired magazine went around to interview the founders of Wired. Here's Kevin Kelly talking about Wired and HotWired. (In this video, you can see the back of my head at 1:32. Boing Boing manager John Battelle is in the blue t-shirt across from me.)
To celebrate its 15th anniversary, Wired sent a film crew around to some of its former co-founders so we could reminence on tape. They came to my studio this spring and I talked about why the magazine was started and why I still read it and write for it. They edited the footage as a commercial for their ad sales efforts. I just noticed it was up on YouTube. (Louis Rossetto's is here.) Naturally they cut out the interesting stuff, but I did enjoy the little fragments and glimpses of the early Wired days.History of Wired
the latest
latest episodes
I was always sad that they made it huge and MONDO 2000 bit the dust. They all owe a big thank you to William Gibson, IMHO
Spendy Fashionista Tech-porn. Yawn.
I was just talking about magazines I miss. I listed Boing Boing (of course) and that Mondo 2000 had more content in 1 issue than Wired in 6. Of course Wired put out 6 to 8 issue for every one Mondo did, so I guess it evens out.
Spendy? Wired is about $10/year for a subscription...
I did not see Will Kreth in there, they did cut out the interesting stuff.
Will Kreth is in the photo! He's to the right of the woman in the red jacket.
I remember my first WIRED. January 1995. The magazine was like no other magazine I've read before. It simply blew my mind.
13.5 years later I am still a loyal reader.
I saw an episode of Computer Chronicles the other day with a BEARDLESS Kevin Kelly! It was the HyperCard one where he was using it with the Whole Earth Catalog. You can watch it here: http://www.archive.org/details/CC501_hypercard
Ah, good ol' Stewart Cheifet.
And I'm glad Wired magazine is still around!
I got my sub for Wired when I was 13, and it quite radically shaped my view and expectation of technology and the culture that was / would grow off it (and vice versa). It came right after I discovered William Gibson for the first time, and was my adolescent porn, arriving in that brown paper bag every month.
Well, that and Men's Fitness magazine.
Agreed w/r/t Mondo 2000 passing the torch to Wired.
More troubling, however, is where have all of the technological determinism / cypherpunk / crypto anarchist / financial cryptography / disruptive innovation / singularity / extropian / transhuman / cyborgs gone?
Why are they hiding, rather than confronting, all of this government blathering nonsense about "terrorism" and the tragically real resurgence of nationalism?
What's the new Wired? It's kinda BoingBoing, having inherited the fallout of after Wired stopped being cool after the first 2-3 years of its publication. But BoingBoing also tries to be more contemporary than radical; it doesn't have that "take this designer drug delivered via nanites into your visual cortex to augment your virtual reality datafeed illegally hosted in a strong cryptography distributed data haven called BlackNet" with a twist of Philip K. Dick paranoia regarding the social construction of reality (or is it an augmented reality game?) feel that Mondo 2000 / WELL / Wired had.
And where is my Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong?!?!
I mean, fuck, I can't even find people to talk about community wireless mesh networks anymore...
Do I blame the AOLers? or the "Web 2.0" jerk-offs?
I'll be here, watching Max Headroom, waiting for a response.
(and waiting for the 1080p HD release of both seasons of Ghost in the Shell.)
Sweet - I did the music for this! (The super-hectic drum and bass stuff from Wired TV.) That was a blast from the past.
@11 Jonathan Golub
Hearing it made me dig out my old Roni Size and Reprazent album and listen to it again, if you want to take that as a compliment.
Yeah, Will Kreth got kinda screwed, as did a number of other people. I wasn't a wired employee, but I was there a lot, even before it published. I put in the first WIRED.COM machine for them (a modest little box with 386BSD or something).
Eh, no major regrets - Tom... Wired & HotWired were wild rides and the journey pretty much was the reward, per se. (I always remember your term "NOS -Boxen" - in reference to the plethora of cheap Network Operating System - or "NOS" - 386 boxes there at your crib on the Panhandle in SF - the ToasterNet setup, right ?)
I do remember the day (before the magazine launched) in Oct. 1992 when Louis and I went down to Cygnus for the TLG (the little garden) meeting where you, John Gilmore and Tim Pozar were somewhat presiding over the assembled group - and to register wired.com through TLG. Most magazines did not have a presence anywhere on the Net, let alone their own domain names. That was way cool.