Wired burst onto the scene in January 1993, a San Francisco-based venture with no corporate backing in a shrinking magazine market with a mission to cover "the biggest story of the decade -- the convergence of computing, telecommunications, and the media." It not only survived but went from bimonthly to monthly several issues ahead of schedule and broke even in its first year of business, while winning a National Magazine Award and being named Advertising Age's start-up magazine of the year.

Wired is to technology in the '90s, many say, what Rolling Stone was to music in the '70s, an analogy that makes some of its biggest fans nervous, given what many see as Rolling Stone's blunted edge. But for now, Wired is required reading in Silicon Valley and for cyber-junkies on the Internet, and it is quickly catching on with the just plain technologically curious. Investors and advertisers are salivating over the hottest book in the business.

Wired may well have established a longer-term legacy, too. The magazine has positioned itself as documentarian as well as analyst of the community it covers. It combines an in-the-moment urgency about its subject matter with an effort to provide a comprehensive record of the digital revolution.

Not that the media ignored the computer revolution before Wired's birth. Niche magazines like Mondo 2000 and bOING bOING still offer sanctuary for hackers and cyber-junkies, while industry publications like PC World and MacWEEK dutifully relay the nuts and bolts of the computer business to others. Wired has bridged this gap. More importantly, its premise -- that computers infiltrate every aspect of our lives, from the way we shop, to they way we relay messages, to the way we listen to music, to the way we are watched -- allows it to approach its subject matter from a human perspective rather than a technological one. "We are reflecting and building and illustrating a community," says managing editor John Battelle, who is twenty-eight.

Still, for readers who didn't grow up in the slice-and-dice MTV generation, the chaotic design and in-your-face imagery can be hard to follow, if not downright intimidating. It is also often difficult to distinguish the ads in Wired from the editorial copy and graphics.

Much of Wired reads like a computer geek's Vanity Fair -- plenty of personality and life-style pieces mingled with harder reporting and analysis. Articles range across the board, including one by William Gibson (the novelist who is said to have coined the term "cyberspace") on modern life and technology in Singapore ("Disneyland with the Death Penalty"); an interview with the singer and emerging multi-media player Laurie Anderson; a look at the government's antitrust investigation of Bill Gates and Microsoft; and a feature on the Sega video game company's "plan for world domination."

While Wired's average reader is no struggling spring chicken (in fact, a thirty-four-year-old male earning a median $ 81,000 a year), the magazine has also addressed Generation X with such stories as, for example, Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs," the author's fictionalized account of his experience of working and living with Microsoft employees for a week. Other pieces offer more abstract and philosophical takes on the culture of the digital age via essays on intellectual property, short attention spans, and the future of the news media. Sprinkled into this mix are heavy doses of hipness in sections such as "Tired/Wired," which lets the confused reader know just what these editors deem "in" (the Internet on cable) and "out" (Time Warner). Still, underneath Wired's hip veneer is an activist publication alert to the potential for abuse in today's computer technology.

Wired's readers spend a lot of their time on the Internet, where there are several areas in which the magazine is discussed. On the Internet, not even a publication like Wired is safe from critics. While some Netters praise it for bringing the masses up to speed on the social, political, and ideological issues of the Information Age, others say it leads too many sheep into the Internet pasture.

Wired has twelve full-time employees dedicated to the Net. Their duties include posting issues of the magazine, selling Wired hats and T-shirts, and getting set for the company's on-line expansion, which is already under way and will be fully operational this fall. This expansion, called HotWired, offers what Wired's Julie Petersen -- "cruise director" of the project -- describes as "an electronic environment. Picture a little on-line city that has a gallery, a convention center, a newsstand, a bar where people can hang out and chat, and maybe some houses," she says.

When this reporter queried the on-line crowd about the kinds of stories that Wired ought to do, suggestions for coverage ranged from the real separation between the computer haves and the have-nots to issues of on-line etiquette. Still, despite the often critical nature of Wired's Net-talk, people on-line responded rather protectively and quite defensively to the idea of a critique of Wired. "Wired readers don't care what isn't in the mag," one person snapped, "they're too busy making use of what is in it."

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