The Birth of Cyberspace

William Gibson got the idea for the novel Neuromancer after seeing a bus stop poster for Apple. He began to imagine what this future would be like, when everybody lived inside a virtual universe. He named that universe “cyberspace”.

“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.” - William Gibson