"Cyberspace" Popularized

1984
Cover of the paperback edition of Neuromancer.

Cover of the paperback edition of Neuromancer.

In 1984 American-Canadian writer William Gibson popularized the term “cyberspace” in his cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.

"The portion of Neuromancer cited in this respect is usually the following:

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

" . . . . Gibson later commented on the origin of the term in the 2000 documentary No Maps for These Territories:

All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page" (Wikipedia article on Cyberspace, accessed 11-26-2010).

Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his short story, Burning Chrome (1982).

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