I've been laid up since Friday with a back injury (I fell out of my loft! Don't worry, no serious damage) and I'm on gobs o' painkillers and hence lack the attention span to do anything except browse.
Yesterday, Mr. FedEx delivered a care-package from a pal in Cal (thanks, Bob!), that included the very first ish ever of Wired, from March 1993. Wow. My first exposure to Wired was issue 1.02, and I devoured it — it was a Bible full of information on an organized movement to bring the whole BBS/Internet world to the masses. Whether such a movement existed is open to debate, but that such a movement emerged cannot be questioned.
The first ish is charming, naieve, and prescient. Simson Garfinkel writes about Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and how the GNU project is stalled and may never produce a GPLed flavor of Unix (it did — but it took Linus Torvalds to hack the kernel).
There's a piece on CNN's new lightweight sat uplinks, and the promising developments being made in something called "MPEG" that may revolutionize satellite transmissions.
Art Kleiner writes about the early movement towards pervasive computing and the possibility of smart, networked toasters. Stewart Brand has a charmingly goofy polemic encouraging new media artists to adopt new paradigms and not just try to repurpose their existing stuff. The only really silly bit is Kevin Kelly's optimistic piece on the emerging standards for ISDN that'll finally bring broadband to consumers.
Also notable:
- A review of some 'zine called "bOING!bOING!" (with a great and goofy shot of Mark and Carla)
- a Jef Pozkanzer's revolutionary new "bozofilter" app for the WELL
- Homebrew, $3000 VR systems that look like the PalmOS port of Doom
- A BBS of the Month section
- An amazingly bang-on piece by Negroponte where he predicts the goat-fuck that is HDTV and tells us that the important thing with TV is being able to control what you watch, not how good it looks.
