I was once an avid reader of Wired magazine. Through my teenaged years I read every issue from 1995 on. I still have all those back issues and wish I wouldn't have missed the first year and a half (those early issues have great covers and some are semi-valuable).
My collection has some great ones though: Steve Jobs in 4.02, 101 Ways to Save Apple in 5.06, the Futurama issue in 7.02, and some Y2k fear mongering in April 1999.
I subscribed from 1995 through my college years, roughly ending in early 2003. This covered the full spectrum of the dot com bubble, from humble beginnings, climbing to a peak and then falling back down. Currently the back issues sit in boxes in my parents basement, but I hope to one day present them more creatively.
Back then Wired had these monthly mini-features that always stuck out in my mind. I believe they did away with them in the modern editions, unfortunately. My favorites were: Music, Just Outta Beta and Tired/Wired.
The Wired music reviews of the mid-to-late 90s were easily the best I read anywhere. Short, succinct, and usually about bands who sounded like they came from Mars. Just Outta Beta was cool too, basically providing updates on what's new and gadgety. I first learned of Zelda for the Nintendo 64, among other things, in this section.
But my favorite Wired magazine section of all time is the Tired/Wired list. This actually became a sort-of low level meme that many people were emulating for a while. It's the word processing equivalent of a 3D logo or glossy pages: a "design" element whose main function is getting readers to talk.
I liked the list because it's two goals were very simple: predict what's no longer cool, functional, or socially acceptable and decide what shall take it's place. Sometimes the list worked along a theme, but not always. Here's an example from August 1998:
| Tired | Wired |
|---|---|
| Human Genome Project | Institute for Genomic Research |
| Creme brulee | Dulce de leche |
| Flat chips | Spherical chips |
| Magic Johnson | Johnny Rotten |
| Slamming | Cramming |
| Platinum Visa | Titanium MasterCard |
| Neve Campbell | Kate Beckinsale |
| Time-release capsules | Polymer-release systems |
| Hot war in the Horn of Africa | Cold war in the Indian subcontinent |
| Holes in the Ozone | Mass in Neutrinos |
These lists were almost always well ahead of their time. Consider August 1996, "Tired: Cell phones. Wired: Pocket email." Or how about December 1995, "Tired: Long-distance carrier wars. Wired: Free after-hours digital cell calls." I like this feature so much because it gets your mind thinking in new directions. The reader is forced to abandon, at least temporarily, an established idea for something whacky and new.
What would be great is if there was an entire website dedicated to this sort of thing. It could be an RSS feed updated with one Tired/Wired combo each day. Maybe with a wiki-style submission process. Wired magazine should also improve their back issue content, though it may be hard to do now. Some of them have raw HTML showing up on the index pages and searching all the mini sub-sections seems difficult.