In 2000, I decided to move to NYC and landed offers at two such dotcom companies. I managed to pick the right one (the other is among Wired's list of disasters) but even the companies that survived the craziness made some bad decisions. The company I worked for sold IT services to other companies yet somehow the previous head of marketing sunk a gob of money into advertising on NYC city buses. There's something rather interesting about how carelessly we're willing to spend someone else's money.

Look at all that faux-vintage web design styling!

Ah, those were good days.

Heh. Roughly 10 years after the burst I actually got my 2nd Aeron char. (The first one still works, of course.)

Christ, don't remind me. I did too much Java programming in the late 90's. Seated alone in my office, I was left with the people skills of Dick Cheney.

Nice.

A magazine that in no small part helped fan the flames of that orgasmic debacle will now fondly celebrate it.

Hehe, we set up with a dial up modem and IE5 on OS 8.6. I didn't know PHP so I had to use Dreamweaver templates (eurgh) to update the 'latest news' links on all the thousands of pages and upload these over a day over dial-up, each week. A week before the crash there was interest from a few possible financiers so we quit university to go full time - as quitting uni seemed as obligatory a part of the start-up mentality as working from a bedroom/garage and table football.

Crash came and after courting from Enron (who went silent in the end, luckily) and a few dozen business plans we just decided to focus on earning money rather than raising it. None of us got rich (or barely minimum wage), but ten years on we're still here, just about, and I guess someone has to be the one who quits uni just as it all starts to implode..

I wasted my time being an unappreciated slave at a start-up years before the boom even started, and by the time all the Stupid Money started pouring into the Bay Area I wanted nothing to do with it. As far as I'm concerned it's the worst thing that ever happened to San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Wired can kiss my ass, goddamn Ayn Rand wealth worshippers.

While the crappy screenshot stylings harkens back to the yellow-text-on-neon-green-and-orange-concentric-circle-background styling of WiRED [sic] of old, I find the text flowing beyond the borders of the dialog boxes distracting, and the chopped text is beyond distracting. (both occur in slide 2)

It doesn't look like camp. It looks like shit. It looks like shit that I would have embarrassed by as a 16 year old kid in 1992 with a copy of MS Publisher.

This was shortly after I graduated high school and most people I knew were just really resentful that all these newcomers (to San Francisco) were driving the rents up sky high so that we couldn't afford to move out. We were hoping another earthquake would happen and scare them all away.

Yes, anyone who has actually read Charles Mackay could have looked at the quotes cited in Wired at that time and seen this for what it was. This sort of thing was not that far off from floating a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.

A brilliant reminder of how much I love Wired's designers and illustrators.