It's time to reach back into the tech magazine archive again, and this time we landed on the December 1996 issue of Wired, from the early, independent years before the magazine became part of a massive corporation. The whopping 300-page issue features an enormous cover story by Neal Stephenson, who follows the laying of what was at the time the longest undersea fiber optic cable in the world, plus stories that are still relevant today about digital surveillance, AI-driven financial trading, the evolution of the laptop, the beginning of modern ad tracking and consumer data collection, and plenty more. Join us as we do our best to dig through this time capsule and remember that uniquely '90s spirit of the times around the early Internet.