Introduction

“Language Technology/Electric Word” was a magazine founded in the late 1980s by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, who went on to create Wired magazine some years later.

Unlike Wired, “Language Technology/Electric Word” was a creature of the pre-internet era. In fact, the word “internet” was unknown to the vast majority of computer users (and there weren’t many of them).

Translators were early adopters of personal computers (Apple, IBM-compatible and other offerings, such as the venerable “green” Amstrad, whose box doubled as a desk — you just cut along the dotted line to make room to get your knees in). Computer usage took on a new dimension with online services such as Compuserve.

At the same time, hardware and software companies were having to face the problems of translating their products and manuals into a variety of languages. It was out of this “primeval soup” that a Dutch translation company, INK International (now part of LionBridge), decided to create a magazine.

Here’s how Louis Rossetto tells it:

Language Technology begat Electric Word begat Wired
Louis Rossetto

Jane and I started and published Language Technology/ Electric Word in Amsterdam before we were shut down by our then publisher Media Nederland. At the time we thought it a tragedy, but in fact it liberated us to move to San Francisco to start Wired.

Language Technology/Electric Word was a formative learning experience for Jane and me, as well as a vehicle for discovery. Originally, Language Technology was started by a translation firm that worked for personal computer hardware and software companies. They had a small research operation to produce translation tools. They wanted to market them, and decided that magazine advertising was the way. Since there was no suitable magazine available, they decided to start their own. I tried to talk them out of it, suggesting that instead of losing money on a magazine they hire two salespeople and have them contact every translator and translation company directly. They rejected my advice and appointed me editor. Jane soon joined me in Amsterdam from Paris, where she had been a marketing director at a fashion house. Dutch fashion being an oxymoron at the time, she ended up becoming our Marketing Director. There were only two of us, but we didn’t care, we were in love.

We launched Language Technology in the mid-1980s, as the personal computer revolution started by Apple and IBM began to have real impact, and as global data networks started to grow. I didn’t know anything about language or technology, and LT/EW offered me the opportunity to personally meet programmers, researchers, developers, and marketers on the cutting edge of technological change. In doing so, I was struck with the power of their ideas, and by how many were idealists who felt their work would cause revolutions in business, education, communication, and civil society. It was this exposure and discovery which inspired Jane and me to start Wired later.

Meanwhile, we had fun with Electric Word, as we ultimately re-christened it. Naturally, the translation company ran into financial difficulty, and jettisoned the magazine since it wasn’t part of their core business. We were acquired by a start up company called Media Nederland, which had ambitions to put together the Dutch equivalent of the media empires Murdoch and Maxwell were then putting together. They wanted us because we were using the latest publishing technologies — desktop publishing and networks. They felt they could leverage that knowledge in other publications. Later, they would draft me to be launch editor-in-chief of their glossy, Esquire-wannabe men’s magazine O, but that’s a whole other story.

Under Media Nederland, our staff grew to eight, and we beavered away in the basement of a townhouse near Amsterdam’s Vondel Park putting it out every other month. At press time, I would disappear into the office for round-the-clock sessions copyediting and laying out the front and back sections of the magazine, when I wasn’t pedaling around town in the dead of night on my bike to check on the progress of the cover and middle sections being put together by our art directors, first Max Kisman, then Henri Lucas in their studios.

I believe we were the first European magazine to be published on DTP — I carried the copy of Ready Set Go back from Macworld where I had scored a review copy and used it to produce the first issue. We switched to Pagemaker for the second issue, immediately after Aldus finally released it. Another first was the last issue; I had carried a copy of PhotoShop back from the TED conference in Monterey and put Ricky Wurman on the cover in some psychedelic hallucination — which was not intended but a complete mistake because we simply didn’t understand how to use the new program. I believe that may have been the first use of Photoshop in any magazine.

We never had more than 15,000 subscribers, but they were an eclectic collection that ran from translators to 80 of the premier tech research centers and labs around the world. We were thrilled when Kevin Kelly at Whole Earth Review discovered the magazine on his own and wrote a review calling it “The Least Boring Computer Magazine in the World”. Naturally, that became our cover tagline.

Jane and I can truthfully say that we learned the nuts and bolts of magazine publishing from the ground up at LT/EW (and also what not to do from watching the slow motion implosion of our parent Media Nederland, whose grand ambitions ultimately drove them to bankruptcy, owing Jane and me and other contributors thousands of dollars). We wrote the business plan for Wired while we there, complete with five years of spreadsheet projections which had 5,000 calculations and 120 variables. It took an hour to recalc on our second generation Apple Macintosh in our living room. We made dinner while we waited.

Electric Word was scruffy fun, training wheels for Wired. It was the post-post graduate course in editing and publishing we needed to do Wired. We honored that experience by calling the opening news section of Wired “Electric Word”. I will always have fond memories of that time, and for the people who knew us through it then.

Unlike Wired, LTEW has not been available online … until now. Since I believe that the magazine was way before its time, and that people should be able to access it, I have decided to scan each issue and put it online as a PDF. OCRing the content is too time-consuming right now, but I plan to type up the full table of contents of each issue. Below is the list of issues that are available online. More will be added Just click to see a table of contents and a link to download a PDF.