Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. Owned by Condé Nast Publications, it reports on how technology affects culture, the economy, and politics.

Wired's editorial stance was originally inspired by the ideas of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, credited as the magazine's "patron saint" in early colophons. Wired has both been admired and disliked for its strong libertarian principles, its enthusiastic embrace of techno-utopianism, and its sometimes experimental layout with its bold use of fluorescent and metallic inks.

From 1998 to 2006, Wired magazine and Wired News (which publishes at Wired.com) had separate owners. However, throughout that time, Wired News remained responsible for reprinting Wired magazine's content online, due to a business agreement made when Condé Nast purchased the magazine (but not the website). In July 2006, Condé Nast announced an agreement to buy Wired News for $25 million, reuniting the magazine with its website.

History

The magazine was founded by American journalist Louis Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe in 1993 with initial backing from software entrepreneur Charlie Jackson and industry pundit Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, who was a regular columnist for six years, through 1998. The founding designers were John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr (Plunkett+Kuhr), beginning with a 1991 prototype and continuing through the first five years of publication, 1993-98.

Wired was a great success at its launch and was lauded for its vision, originality, innovation and cultural impact. In its first four years, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and one for Design.

The founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was formerly one of the editors of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review, and he brought with him many contributing writers from those publications. Six authors of the first issue, Wired 1.01 had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling and Stewart Brand. Other contributors to Whole Earth appeared in Wired, including William Gibson, who was featured on Wired's cover in its first year and whose article "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" resulted in the publication being banned from Singapore. Despite the fact that Kelly was involved in launching the WELL, an early source of public access to the Internet and even earlier non-Internet online experience, Wired's first issue (1.01) de-emphasized the Internet, and primarily talked about interactive games, cell-phone hacking, digital special effects, military simulations, and Japanese otaku. However, the first issue contained some references to the internet, including online-dating and internet sex, and a tutorial on installing a "bozo filter." The last page, a column written by Nicholas Negroponte, was written in the style of an e-mail message, but contained obviously fake, non-standard e-mail addresses. By the third issue in the fall of 1993 the 'Net Surf' column began listing interesting FTP sites, news groups, and email addresses, at a time when the numbers of these things were small and this information was still extremely novel to the public. Wired was among the first magazines to list the email address of its authors and contributors.