The magazine was started by a journalist named Louis Rossetto and his friend Jane Metcalfe, along with Ian Charles Stewart, in 1993. In the early days, they were backed up by a software entrepreneur named Charlie Jackson and an academic named Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, who was a columnist for six years (through 1998) and wrote the book "Being Digital". The founding designers were John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr (Plunkett+Kuhr), starting with a 1991 verson and keeing up through the first five years of their magazine, 1993–98.