Cyberspace in William Gibson's Neuromancer

Cyberspace in William Gibson's Neuromancer

As described by William Gibson in his science fiction novel Neuromancer, cyberspace was a "Consensual hallucination that felt and looked like a physical space but actuallly was a computer-generated construct representing abstract data." Years later, mankind has realized that Gibson's vision is very close to reality. The term cyberspace was frequently used to explain or describe the process in which two computers connect with each other through various telephone lines. In this communication between the two systems there seems to be no distance between them.

There are now four catagories that describe the major components of todays cyber space. One oof those is commercial on-line services. These large computer systems can host thousands of users simultaneously. When a computer user purchases an account from the company they recieve a screen name and a password.

The user then can use his or her screen name and password to log on and use the system. Most of the online systems have chat rooms where users can chat in real time with one another. some users even think of on-line services as a community.

The second catagory involves Bulletin Boards or (BBS's). These services allow the user accounts like their larger on-line service cousins. These BBS's have less users because they run on smaller computers. The system operators, more commonly known as sysops, are running the boards. Since most BBS's are hobbies there is usually no charge for an account. The same as on-line services, users use BBS's for trades, games, and to chat among other users. Since bulletin boeard are so easy to set up there are thousands of them located around the world. Each board has a theme. These themes range from astronomy to racist neo-nazi crap. A boards theme helps users in their search for a board that will satisfy their personal preference.

A third catagory is the Private System. These private systems sometime run bulletin boards privately, not letting the public acess. In these private systems users can perform specialized computer operations, or access to data.

Through this private network users within a company can send mail, faxes, and other messages to each other through the companies computer network. If a worker was to look up a customers information he could access it through the companies private network. The public can not get access to the companies private system unless he or she knows the systems password.

The fourth and last catagory is computer networks. These collections are a group of connected computers that exchange information. One of the most well known is the internet. The internet is the so called "network of networks.