30 Years of HotWired: The Complicated Legacy of the Website That Built the Modern Internet

Nostalgia has never been WIRED’s strong suit. We’re hardwired to look forward, not back. But every so often, even the most committed future zealots have to pause and take stock of where we came from. Thirty years to the month after we launched HotWired—our first website, and one of the first major media sites on the entire internet—it’s time to confront our role in the messy world we helped build.

Conventional wisdom holds that the internet went terribly wrong long ago. AI has flooded the digital sphere with algorithmically generated, dehumanized junk content. Online spaces are overrun by bad actors of every stripe: roaming hate groups, organized troll armies, and authoritarian oligarchs bent on disrupting democracies. Identity thieves, misinformation peddlers, and revenge porn operators lurk in every corner of cyberspace. If there’s anything left untainted online, it’s probably the endless stream of goat videos people still love to share.

Looking back, the 30-year rush of hundreds of millions, then billions, of people onto the clunky, cobbled-together early network protocols probably could have used a far more careful project manager.

But let’s be honest: WIRED isn’t just an observer of this mess—we helped create it. Exactly 30 years ago this month, we let the genie out of the bottle when we launched HotWired. Bright, curious, and unapologetically experimental, HotWired covered an entire new world traditional media refused to touch: extreme sports, craft cocktails, alternative medicine, and DJ culture. It was the first website ever to cover a U.S. presidential election, walked total newcomers through the basics of going online in its iconic Web 101 column, and launched beloved early digital staples like the satirical zine Suck! (If you don’t know it, go look it up—we’ll wait.) HotWired was an experiment, a scrappy startup, the first major stress test for what the web could be. And it was the keystone that held the early public web together.

Let’s dial back to 1994. For almost everyone, “being online” meant stepping into a vast, empty wasteland. Only a small, cult-like clique of self-proclaimed visionaries knew what it was all about—huddled in a post-punk loft in San Francisco, surrounded by tangles of Ethernet cable, and obsessed with this wild new thing they called cyberspace.

John Plunkett, founding designer: We launched the print edition of WIRED a full year before most people had even heard of the web. Back then, you could count on two hands the number of people on the planet who owned both a computer and a modem that worked well enough to get online.

Andrew Anker, CEO: No one knew for sure the web would win out. It was just one of many options back then, but it looked more promising than any alternative.

Brian Behlendorf, chief engineer: Back in those days, it was easy to feel optimistic about what the future would bring.

John Plunkett: What other option did we have? Kevin figured every other outlet would be skeptical of new tech, so we’d lean the other way.

Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of WIRED: Over time, optimism became our core… what’s the right word? Our competitive advantage.

John Plunkett: When the Mosaic browser launched, we knew we were WIRED—we couldn’t not have a website.

Louis Rossetto, WIRED founder: One day my assistant came to me and said, “Hey, did you know there’s already a WIRED website out of Singapore? They scraped all our print content and put it online.” So the first WIRED website wasn’t even made by WIRED. I thought, “Holy shit, we need to take control of this ourselves.”

John Plunkett: And after that, we all just looked at each other and asked: Wait, what is a website, anyway?

That question was far more legitimate than it sounds today. Mosaic, the first popular mainstream web browser, was co-created by Marc Andreessen back when he was just a 21-year-old coding prodigy. I’d been connected to digital networks in one form or another since 1979, when I was a kid accessing a time-sharing system. Back then, the internet was only for nerds and role-players—warlocks and druids, basically. But Mosaic was different: it was friendly, accessible, the first real front door for regular people to step into the internet, which felt as endless and fathomless as the ocean and deep space combined. It was a beguiling infinity. And into that vast open promise, HotWired streaked like a comet.

Barbara Kuhr, founding designer: We saw this as a grand experiment—we were giddy with the thrill of figuring out what was even possible. We spent half our time just asking one question: What is the web actually good for?

Kevin Kelly: I kept saying, “I think HotWired should update daily.” Back then, that sounded like an impossible, wildly ambitious idea.

John Plunkett: Part of our core editorial mission was introducing regular people to the internet, one step at a time.

Howard Rheingold, executive editor: When WIRED launched, I was one of the first writers they invited to contribute. I already knew how the operation worked, so when Kevin asked me to come on as executive editor of HotWired, it made sense.

Julie Chiron, managing editor: People moved from all across the country just to work there. HotWired was the mecca for people who got it—they’d say, “I have to work here, I want to build this thing.” It was like moths to a flame.

June Cohen, vice president of content: I took this job knowing I’d never make much money, and most people wouldn’t even understand what I was working on. That’s exactly what made it fascinating to me.

Julie Chiron: No one cared where you came from or what your resume looked like at HotWired. All that mattered was whether you “got it” — whether this new technology excited you.

Jane Metcalfe, WIRED co-founder: For years, I literally didn’t spend time with anyone who wasn’t part of the digital revolution. If you didn’t know what the internet was, I didn’t have time for you.

Louis Rossetto: Jane came up with the name WIRED, actually. She said, somebody’s “wired” right? They’re caffeinated, they’re amped up, whatever it is they’re on—they’re plugged in.

Howard Rheingold: Our office was in an old building South of Market that used to be the city unemployment office. I’d actually gone there when I was young to collect unemployment checks. The whole place smelled like Chinese takeout at lunch. We just put doors on old filing cabinets and used those as desks.

Ian McFarland, developer and sysadmin: The first time we turned HotWired on, we had a power outage within two seconds. We all joked it was the hand of God coming down—none of us were religious, but it felt like a sign: You’re changing the world, so I’m shutting you down first to prove it.

Against all odds, HotWired flickered back on, and this time it stayed up. (“You know a lot about a lot,” the site’s editors later wrote to new visitors, “but you’re still a babe in the woods when it comes to the strange, exciting territory of the Web and the Internet.”) Seeing media live online really was dazzling back then. The site got five hits a second—sometimes far more. But none of us even really knew what a “hit” meant; we just knew it was working better than we expected.

Brian Behlendorf: I used to run tail -f on the web server logs in a window on my desktop, just to watch in real time as browsers requested pages and media from our server, to make sure everything was working. After we launched, it was impossible to keep up. The log scrolled by faster than the human eye could follow. I couldn’t even guess what that translated to in terms of daily unique visitors back then.

Ian McFarland: There was a coffee shop called Caffe Centro just down the street from our office. I remember sitting at a table one day realizing that the small group of us sitting there were responsible for roughly 25 percent of all web traffic on the entire planet.

John Plunkett: Our slogan became “New thinking for a new medium.”

Julie Chiron: We were teaching each other everything, all the time. We’d go, “How do you do this online?” or “How do you get an image to work in Flash?” That was a huge deal back then.

Kevin Kelly: But we all agreed we hated “shovelware”—just dumping the print magazine’s content straight onto the web. That wasn’t native enough to the new medium.

Barbara Kuhr: I limited the entire site to seven colors. Any clickable element had to have that signature blue box around it. People either loved it or hated it—no in-between.

Howard Rheingold: We actually had a full meeting to debate whether we should add hyperlinks to our writing. Today that sounds like debating whether you should add punctuation to a sentence. Back then, everything was brand new.

Rheingold had published The Virtual Community in 1993, a book whose earnest, charming subtitle promised “Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.” Its core argument was pure nerdy optimism: the internet was just a place for warm, slightly quirky people looking for friends and connection. But behind the scenes at HotWired, not everyone agreed on what the site should be. Some saw it as a grassroots movement. Some saw it as a business. Others saw it as an avant-garde art project. Even then, and even now, no one could figure out how to make money publishing online.

Andrew Anker: Louis got to the point where he said, “This needs a real business plan.” That’s why they hired me.

Julie Chiron: There were disagreements about editorial direction from day one.

Brian Behlendorf: The big fight was whether the site should center content, with community as a nice bonus, or center community, with content as a bonus. Jonathan Steuer and Howard Rheingold wanted the second option.

Will Kreth, director of the “Piazza” chat section: That didn’t mean they didn’t care about making money. They weren’t anti-capitalist or anything like that. They just wanted to take slow, small steps toward commercialization.

Julie Chiron: Howard had written his whole book about community, and he said the web should be like jazz—one big open jam session that everyone could join.

Howard Rheingold: The founding team and I saw digital culture as something that grows from the people who use it, not from editors.

Justin Hall, editorial assistant: We wanted to build spaces for chat where people could share the things they built and the things they found with the whole community.

Will Kreth: Chat was just fun back then.

Justin Hall: But the people who ran the print magazine thought differently. They said, “We’re the tastemakers. We’re not here to curate a million random posts from a million random people.”

Andrew Anker: I’d worked in media long enough to know what advertisers wanted, and chat isn’t a media product. It’s really hard to sell advertising against chat. We needed something focused on media that advertisers would actually pay for.

Brian Behlendorf: There was a lot of tension. I tried to stay out of it as much as I could.

Jonathan Steuer, online lead: The more Louis realized that unedited content from other people—some of it not produced by professional writers—would end up on his website, the more nervous he got. Neither Howard nor I stayed there very long after that.

Howard Rheingold: Louis saw himself as the editor as ultimate arbiter, like Helen Gurley Brown or Hugh Hefner. Kevin once told me, “You never win an argument with Louis.”

Kevin Kelly: Louis had a quote taped to his desk that said the unreasonable man is the only one who ever gets anything done. He fully embraced that label—he was the unreasonable man, through and through.

June Cohen: Louis truly is a visionary, an inventor, an innovator, the classic Silicon Valley founder. Everyone had a healthy mix of respect and, let’s be honest, wariness around him. I don’t want people to think everyone was scared of him—he commanded respect, and he earned it.

Jonathan Steuer: A lot of the original early team joined the company Howard and I were building, not the one it turned into after the shift.

What that shift meant: the company chose profit over the collective, utopian vision. Some even called it selling out. Rheingold’s collectivist vision for HotWired read as outright socialism to Louis, an anarcho-libertarian capitalist. But that push for profitability led to the innovation HotWired is still most famous for—one that would become one of the web’s most defining, and most hated, staples: the banner ad.

John Plunkett: I first suggested a corporate sponsorship model, with a little box at the top of the page for the sponsor’s logo. That very quickly turned into the first ad banner.

Ian McFarland: Four of us sat around a table going, “We have no idea how big the ad should be. What size makes sense?”

John Battelle, founding managing editor of WIRED: Louis said, “What if we put it at the top, so users can just scroll past it if they don’t care?”

John Plunkett: AT&T was our first customer. Their ad copy read: “Have you ever clicked here? You will.” AT&T loved the ad, but they didn’t even have their own website yet to send people to. So we hired Brian to build AT&T’s first website for them.

Brian Behlendorf: In my weaker moments, I admit I built the first banner ad. I’ve been apologizing for it ever since.

Jill Atkinson Codding, project manager: In hindsight, it was what it was. We had to make money somehow. We tried to do it in the least intrusive way we could.

John Battelle: That was the original sin of the internet: we decided advertising could be irrelevant, untethered to the content people were actually reading.

Ian McFarland: We had no idea if more brands would actually spend money on this. Then we got four sponsors, then six, eight, 10, 12. The whole advertising model just stuck. None of us expected we were launching the biggest economic revolution since the steam engine.

Barbara Kuhr: Cookies were invented very quickly after that. We had a lot of debates even back then about whether tracking users was appropriate.

Brian Behlendorf: For the record, even though I helped develop the cookie, I never would have combined it with advertising. When someone first suggested, “Hey, you can assign a unique cookie to each user, serve ads from third parties, and track them across every site they visit,” my response was, “Yeah, that’s something a psychopath would do.”

Of course, the system went forward anyway. And we as users just clicked right through, blindly. No one knew what the long-term consequences would be—least of all the HotWired team. And let’s be real: everyone needs money. Even the cool kids working at 1990s HotWired had expenses: corduroy overalls, Jolt Cola, rave tickets.

Will Kreth: San Francisco rave culture was a precursor to HotWired. Brian Behlendorf actually ran SFraves back then.

Brian Behlendorf: I was pretending to be a student, but really I was throwing parties and running the SFrave mailing list. I met Jonathan Steuer at a Terence McKenna talk with Spacetime Continuum.

Justin Hall: For one Halloween party, they gave me a $1,500 budget. I spent $900 of it on LSD microdots. I was only 19. The young people on staff were into music, psychedelics, dancing, exploring alternative identity and kink. There were plenty of people who wanted those microdots.

June Cohen: There were definitely team members who smoked weed first thing in the morning. We had a weekly masseuse and free food—all the things that are standard in Silicon Valley now, we were doing it back then.

Susanna Camp, Piazza producer: Once we had potential funders or buyers coming to visit the office, and we were playing kickball in the conference room. It was not a good look.

Jill Atkinson Codding: We obviously didn’t have a formal dress code, so I started Formal Fridays. We’d all show up in ball gowns and have cocktails after work.

John Battelle: We didn’t exactly sleep at the office, but we were there all the time. We’d eat dinner in the office at 8 or 9 at night.

June Cohen: The whole culture had a lot of overlap with 1960s hippie ideals.

Justin Hall: You could buy Burning Man tickets on Haight Street for $30, sold out of a spot behind the post office. One day I said, “Hey, anyone want to go to Burning Man tonight?” And a bunch of people said yes. We went to everyone’s house to pick up sleeping bags and ramen, if they had any, and just drove out there.

June Cohen: I went with them two years later, in 1996. I never went back. I just couldn’t… how do I put this? I couldn’t handle being around that many of my coworkers when they were naked and on psychedelics.

Susanna Camp: We were pretty unruly. They brought in some older people to be the “adults in the room” to get the rest of us to behave a little more.

The adults in the room were, of course, the money people. Like Starbuck in Moby-Dick, they were forever reminding Ahab that the point of the voyage wasn’t a cosmic quest—it was turning a profit. The utopian young team pushed back, most notably with Webmonkey, a site that published HotWired’s own web-building code for free. It was completely transparent about everything HotWired was building, and how it was built, sparking debates about open source sharing that still haven’t been resolved today.

John Plunkett: A lot of what we did was rethinking interface. Barbara and I started with the idea that you’d have a home screen, then secondary screens you could link to. Our big goal was getting everyone to understand that this