By Douglas Cruickshank
The headquarters of HotWired is wired in hot pink. The barn-sized room is painted the same cool off-white as the ubiquitous computer monitors sitting on every table top, but the retina-spraining pink Ethernet cable, snaking across the ceiling and down the immense columns, appears to be leaping all over the place---an aerobics workout for optic nerves. "I chose the color myself," Jonathan Steuer announces proudly.
Photo By Dave Casteel
Steuer, HotWired's information and technology architect, has managed the development of online activities for Wired magazine since September of 1993, and for much of the last year he's been steering HotWired towards this fall's Internet launch. The experience of putting Wired on the Internet, and the response it got, planted the seed for HotWired. "It made us think about what online does well versus what print does well," Steuer remarks. "Online is great for small pieces of information that are updated relatively quickly, late breaking, on the edge, need to be distributed fast, and, perhaps, accompanied by sounds, graphics, movies or whatever. And that's what HotWired is."
Once he'd taken on the mission to make HotWired real, Steuer lost no time heading for SIGGRAPH. "I spent hours wandering around, talking to people, checking out the technology," he says. "The thing that impressed me about Silicon Graphics was that every person that I spoke with at their booth knew exactly what I needed to know and who I needed to see next. By the time I walked out, I felt that SGI, more than any other technology company that I'd talked to, would be the perfect partner for getting HotWired up and running."
In addition to looking for computer systems that were equal to his ambitions for HotWired, Steuer was seeking a company that understood those ambitions. "Silicon Graphics has an infrastructure that is primed for thinking about media from a content provider's point of view," he says, "from an artist's point of view, and from the point of view of actually producing work and getting it out the door. They really understand media ---music, film, all of it. I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, these people actually get it. SGI's figured out that it's not about boxes anymore, and it's not about selling machines, it's about plugging machines in as solutions to people's creative problems." I wanted to work with a company that had that attitude. And I knew that to do HotWired, we needed a platform with a nice easy interface, a box that handles any media type I care to feed into it, and which can convert that data so I can send it out across the Web. Who else but Silicon Graphics is doing that and keeping it cost effective and fun?"
At present, HotWired has a small herd of Indy and Indigo workstations with plans to add more of the high-performance systems later. Brian Behlendorf, HotWired's Webmaster, uses an Indigo to maintain the Web site. "The SGI machines," says Behlendorf, "just perform better than the desktop systems we've been using. They're much faster, and they make it easier to preview and manipulate images. The Indigo performs extremely well as a Web server. It copes with about 30,000 hits a day. If things go as planned, we expect to be getting over 100,000 Web hits a day. At that point, we'll be using one or two of the Indys as our Web servers. We're also using Xinet to mount one of our UNIX volumes onto our Mac network. That enables the people on the Macs and the people on the SGI systems to collaborate." In addition to its Indigo Web server, HotWired is equipped with five Indy workstations some running Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, and XAOS Tools.
"Having Silicon Graphics as a technology partner," Jonathan Steuer adds, "is a great situation for us. It means that we can set up a publishing system on a platform that, in terms of both the interface and back end, is well-suited to our needs. In addition to which there are tools to do a lot of cool stuff that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do."
Sound will also be a significant component of HotWired, Brian Behlendorf explains. "We'll use the Indys for our audio---digitizing, and converting and manipulating sound---things you really couldn't do on a less powerful system. On our Web site, audio will be part of HotWired's multimedia presentation, where images and sounds are combined with text. People can download the audio while they're reading a story and it will play asynchronously."
Outside, a few blocks away, a tsunami of fog is pushing the late afternoon traffic down the freeway toward the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Jonathan Steuer walks over to the huge window that runs the length of the office's rear wall, looks down at his green shoes and then out towards the freeway. "We're just on the road at this point," Steuer says. "I think HotWired is as good a stab at interactive TV as anybody's ever made." Interactive TV? "Yes, it incorporates the inherently interactive parts: The user control of content, the ability to carry on discussions about the material, the ability to have real-time interaction with other people on the Net. Those are three of the fundamental elements. Our idea for this publication is that it take advantage of all the things you can do with interactivity in a real world setting, and say "This isn't special, it's not a test," and see how people use it. It is a fascinating research opportunity."
Steuer pauses then quickly shifts gears. "You know, I really want to put a big flashing strobe sign in the window, but I don't know what the state highway folks would say about it. I don't know if we can really do it. But if we did, each pane of the window would have a letter attached to it with a strobe behind each one. The strobes would be triggered by the Web server. So whenever someone out there hits on a page the sign on the window would flash out toward the freeway."
"What will your sign say?" someone asks. "HotWired!," Steuer replies, "of course."
