The New York times


July 29, 1999

Origins: Walkman Sounded Bell for Cyberspace

By BRUCE HEADLAM

     A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
     nightly."

     That is the first appearance of the word cyberspace, in William
     Gibson's 1984 novel "Neuromancer." It's well known that Gibson
     conceived of cyberspace, which he defined variously as "a graphic
     representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer
     in the human system" and a "consensual hallucination," before he
     even used a computer: he wrote "Neuromancer" on a manual
     typewriter.

     What is perhaps less well known is that a large part of the
     inspiration for "cyberspace" resulted from his first experience
     wearing a Sony Walkman in the summer of 1981.

     "I had gone into a small neighborhood electronics store, never even
     having heard of the Walkman," he said in an interview from
     Vancouver. "They had one on display and the guy told me, 'You're
     not going to believe this.'

     "I haven't had that immediate a reaction to a piece of technology
     before or since. I didn't analyze it at the time, but in
     retrospect, I recognized the revolutionary intimacy of the
     interface. For the first time I was able to move my nervous system
     through a landscape with my choice of soundtrack.

     "I immediately thought, 'I have to have this,' although I didn't
     have any money. I was poor back then and the Walkman cost something
     like 350 Canadian dollars."

     Gibson bought it anyway. But since he didn't own any cassette
     tapes, he had a friend record some music for him. "I took the
     Walkman to downtown Vancouver," he said, "listening to Joy
     Division, which I had never heard. It gave Vancouver a kind of
     weird totalitarian grandeur it hadn't previously had for me. I
     didn't take that thing off for a month."

     His conception of cyberspace, he said, arose after he saw a
     bus-stop poster for the Apple IIc that showed only the machine's
     CPU and keyboard, not its monitor. He became captivated with the
     idea of how people might process data in the future.

     "I thought, if there is an imaginary point of convergence where the
     information this machine handles could be accessed with the
     under-the-skin intimacy of the Walkman, what would that be like?"

     Gibson no longer wears a Walkman. With success and money, he said,
     he now has enough CD players to satisfy his interest in music. But
     he is still fascinated with the idea of portable sound. "It's
     almost a metaphorical realization of what we do anyway -- a
     souped-up version of being lost in one's own thoughts," he said.
     "Given the conditions in which most of us increasingly live and the
     hard work required to obtain personal space, I think that's not
     entirely a bad thing."


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