Ev BogueI find it fascinating to read about how far technology has come in just a few short years. I'm currently immersed in "cyberspace" from a beach cafe in Mexico, surrounded by palm trees, drinking a cappucino -- the beans roasted three feet from me.
We've almost completely stopped using the term cyberspace to describe the virtual worlds now. Cyberspace is our-space now.
From an interview with William Gibson in The Paris Review:
I highlighted the best parts, if you're looking for a quick read. I definitely suggest the full interview, if you have time.
Interviewer: "Where did cyberspace come from?"
William Gibson: "I was painfully aware that I lacked an arena for my science fiction. The spaceship had been where science fiction had happened for a very long time, even in the writing of much hipper practitioners like Samuel Delany. The spaceship didn't work for me, viscerally. I know from some interviews of Ballard's that it didn't work for him either. His solution was to treat Earth as the alien planet and perhaps to treat one's fellow humans as though they were aliens. But that didn't work for me. I knew I wouldn't be able to function in a purely Ballardian universe. So I needed something to replace outer space and the spaceship.
I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn't even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them -- it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.
The only computers I'd ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman's jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe."