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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Jack In | ||
| To open one's nervous system to a computer's virtual world. |
As far as I know, this is the first reference to the idea that a humanoid being (note that it is an android doing it) can directly perceive information presented by a computer.
The individual who is using the computer feed is an android, a redesigned and (in some ways) perfected form of human being.
| As he pushed the computer's snub-tipped terminal node into the input jack on his left forearm, the android saw Leon Spaulding's lip tighten in a scowl of - what? Contempt, envy, patronizing scorn? ...At the click of contact, the computer impulses came flooding across the interface into his brain and he forgot about Spaulding.
It was like having a thousand eyes... He was in total communion with the computer, making use of all its sensors, scanners and terminals. Why go through the tedious routine of talking to a computer, when it was possible to design an android capable of becoming part of one? The data torrent brought a surge of ecstasy. ...He raised and lowered scooprods, requisitioned next week's blocks, ordered filaments for the tachyon-beam men... No human could handle this, he knew, even if there was some way for humans to jack themselves directly into a computer... Watchman unjacked himself. |
| Technovelgy from Tower of Glass,
by Robert Silverberg. Published by Gollancz in 1970 Additional resources -
|
William Gibson made frequent use of this term and idea in his 1985 blockbuster Neuromancer:
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
Compare to eccentric projection from The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1974) by James Tiptree, Jr. See the article on the first use of android in The Cometeers (1936) by Jack Williamson.
He slotted some ice, connected the construct and jacked in.
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