Electric Word

~ the goodbye ~

INK Taalservice was a translation company in Amsterdam whose clients kept asking what the new machines could do with words, so it started a magazine to answer them. The title was Language Technology, it came out every two months in English, and the editor was an American named Louis Rossetto. Jane Metcalfe sold the advertising. The Dutch designer Max Kisman designed the first issue, by most accounts the first magazine issue anywhere assembled entirely in desktop publishing software, on a copy of ReadySetGo that Rossetto had carried back from MacWorld in San Francisco.

INK later sold the title to Media Nederland, a small Dutch house, which renamed it Electric Word. The subject matter kept drifting off the translation beat. Alan Kay was on one cover and Timothy Leary on another, with Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte somewhere in between. Kevin Kelly, then at Whole Earth Review, called it the least boring computer magazine in the world, and the line went straight onto the front page, where it was still sitting on the final issue.

Media Nederland changed its focus in 1990 and the magazine stopped at issue 20, dated July and August. Nobody involved seems to have treated it as a catastrophe. Rossetto and Metcalfe had already decided the readers they wanted were somewhere else.

In July 1990 I was six, and in Turkey. It was a bimonthly printed in English in Amsterdam for people who built language software, and nothing about how it was distributed was ever pointed at a Turkish reader. What did reach me, a decade later and in a much louder American accent, was the magazine those two made next.

~ the chronicle ~

~ amsterdam money ~

For its first years the magazine was a translation company's side project, an odd address for a magazine to have. INK was selling human translation into the PC industry and the magazine was reporting on the machines that would eventually eat that business. Selling it on to Media Nederland turned it into an ordinary trade title owned by people with other titles, and ordinary trade titles get closed when the owner reorganizes. That is what happened, with no scandal attached to it.

~ the final cover ~

Issue 20 put Richard Saul Wurman on the front, the TED founder, under a crown of color that was pulled apart on a computer rather than a drawing board. The magazine is generally credited with the first photoshopped magazine cover in the world, and that is the one. Around his head the cover lines read THE DEATH OF PRINT and HACKING THE BRAIN.

At the bottom right, in the same type as everything else, it says INVEST IN THIS MAGAZINE! SEE PAGE 1. A magazine running an appeal for money beside a cover line announcing the death of print was not being ironic on purpose, but the scan is still there and you can read both lines at once.

~ what sailed west ~

Rossetto and Metcalfe moved to San Francisco and spent the next couple of years trying to raise money for a magazine about digital culture, which arrived in 1993 as Wired. The house style traveled with them, the fluorescent color and the contempt for computer magazines that only reviewed computers. So did the habit of putting a thinker on the cover where the product was supposed to go.

Electric Word has no domain and no archive site of its own. It survives as scanned PDFs on archive.org, where you can read the magazine that got the tone right three years early and in the wrong country.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »