Whoa. Great article.

I remember this article from when it first ran in the magazine. At least for me it was the high water mark of Wired - it was pretty much downhill from there.

I had tried reading Snowcrash previous to reading the article, but had been annoyed by it, and had never finished it. This article changed my opinions on Stephenson (as did the In the Beginning was the Command Line essay he wrote) and I looked forward to Cryptonomicon. It's kinda fun to see the parallels and references between this article and the book.