In einem Artikel zur Wiederauflage der bedeutenden Bücher von William Gibson, geht Thomas Jones auch darauf ein, wie Gibson – auf den Cyberspace zurück geht – auf den Begriff kam und was er darunter verstand:
“The first thing I did was to sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling – infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, oh, that’s a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth – I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow.”
In seinem 1984 erschienen Buch Neuromancer war Cyberspace ein Bereich in dem eine Person vollständig aufging. Case, der Held dieses Buches ging vollkommen in diesem Bereich auf wenn er sein Cyberdeck an die Stirn montierte und vor seinem inneren Auge ein dreidimensionales Schachbrett entstehen sah, dass sich bis zur Unendlichkeit ausbreitete.
The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade games – “it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine” – and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple computers. “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.”