‘We were wrong’: An oral history of WIRED’s original website

From the article (archive):

Exactly 30 years ago this month, we let the genie out of the bottle when we launched HotWired, our first website—and one of the first media websites ever. With wit and vitality, HotWired covered a new world that traditional media ignored: thrill sports, cocktails, integrative medicine, DJ culture. It was the first website ever to cover a presidential election. It ushered newcomers online with Web 101. It introduced Suck! (Look it up.) HotWired was improv, a startup, an acid test. And it was the web’s keystone.

So dial up 1994. “Online” is, to all but a culty few, a vast tundra of nothingness. Those culty few? A clique of self-styled clairvoyants holed up in a post-punk loft in San Francisco, awash in Ethernet cable, psychedelics, and a near-erotic mania for this thing called cyberspace …

...

Brian [Behlendorf]: In my defense, while I had a role in inventing the cookie, I would not have combined advertising and cookies. In fact, when somebody proposed, “Hey, you could assign a cookie to somebody, serve that ad from a third-party site, keep that cookie so you can follow where they go across different sites," my response was, “Yeah, if you’re a psychopath.”

HotWired was my second job after college. I was working at Oracle, where lots of people put up internal websites for their departments, but we didn't have Internet access at work. I used dial-up access at home. I saw a job ad in comp.lang.perl looking for a programmer and took the job, taking a minor pay cut to be able to work at an Internet company.

Brian Behlendorf hired me and left the company a week after I joined. Andrew Anker explained to us what stock options were.

The parties were great. I felt like the squarest person there. I went to Burning Man with them.