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"...a few centuries of coherent humanist thought, set against a million odd years of evolved killer ape tendency. No-one's going to give you very good odds on humanism, are they?"
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Cyberspace | ||
| A computer technology that allowed people to see a computer network as an internal experience. |
As far as I know, this is the first instance.
| I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the "Cyberspace Seven," but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon. |
| From Burning Chrome,
by William Gibson. Published by Not known in 1982 Additional resources -
|
Here is a somewhat more detailed description from Neuromancer, which Gibson published two years later.
The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games...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 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 into the distance...
Although the word "cyberspace" is often used to describe the World Wide Web and/or the Internet, neither of these yet measure up to what Gibson was talking about.
Compare this to the Saga simulation from Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel The City and the Stars, the virtual matrix from The Judas Mandala (1982) by Damien Broderick and the Saga simulation from Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel The City and the Stars. Note also the DreamTime Scleral Contact Lenses From The California Voodoo Game (1992) by Larry Niven (w/S. Barnes).
Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a customized cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination known as the matrix.
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| IBM's Grain Of Sand Computer |
| Can An Entire Brain Be Simulated In A Computer? |
| Illustris: The Next Generation Of Universe Simulation |
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
