It started, as the big ideas in technology often do, with a science-fiction writer. William Gibson, a young expatriate American living in Canada, was wandering past the video arcades on Vancouver’s Granville Street when something about the way the players were hunched over their glowing screens struck him as odd. “I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids were,” he says. These kids clearly believed in the space the games projected. 

The image hunted Gibson. He didn’t know much about computers-he wrote his break-trough novel, Neuromancer, on an ancient manual typewriter- but as near as he could tell, everybody who worked much with the machines eventually came to accept, almost as an article of faith, the reality of that imaginary realm. “They develop a belief that there’s some kind of actual space behind the screen,” he says. “Some place that you can’t see but you know is there.” 

Gibson called the place “cyberspace.” In the years since, there have been other names given to that shadowy space where our computer data reside: the Net, the Web, the Cloud, the information superhighway. But Gibson’s coinage may prove the most enduring. By 1989 it had been borrowed to describe not some science-fiction fantasy but today’s increasingly interconnected computer systems-specially the millions of computers jacked into the Internet. 

New York TIME
Spring 1995