As the Internet has evolved, science-fiction writers have kept a close eye on it but it was only in 1984 that William Gibson coined a new phrase and changed the future as readers of science-fiction knew it;

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination (4) experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts? A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding?” (5)

Gibson was referring to a virtual world, one that existed only in the connections between computers, networks and the digital media that users employ to perceive it. His novel Neuromancer had set the pace for a phenomenon that would come to be known as cyberpunk and in the following fifteen years other authors would choose to turn their backs on outerspace, aliens and spaceships in order to loose their protagonists in Gibson?s footsteps. Many would simply take more conventional genres and spin them off into the mostly uncharted literary territory of cyberspace; Gibson?s own protagonist, Case, in many ways is simply a Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe updated for the digital age. A few later authors, like Neal Stephenson, would use cyberspace to actually explore the ?world? of the hacker and more importantly their psychology but in the beginning the look and feel of cyberspace seemed to be more important. This is not surprising as Gibson at the time of writing Neuromancer knew relatively little about computers and those individuals that actually used them on a daily basis. By simply inventing the sections that he knew nothing about Gibson had a unique effect on the culture he had used as his inspiration ? hackers and other computer users took the novel to their hearts and set about attempting to recreate its feel and image amongst themselves. Suddenly the ?nerds? were cool and new buzz-words began to flit through the media, at the forefront cyberpunk.

It seems relevant at this point to give a quick definition of what a hacker actually is and for this I turn your attention to The New Hacker?s Dictionary: