Slashdot Mirror


The Technology of Neuromancer After 25 Years

William Gibson's Neuromancer was first published 25 years ago. Dr_Ken writes with an excerpt from an article at MacWorld that delves into the current state of some of the technology that drives the book: "'Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power. Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails. The book eventually sold more than 160 million copies, but bringing the book to popular attention took a long time and a lot of word-of-mouth. The sci-fi community, however, was acutely aware of the novel's importance when it came out: Neuromancer ran the table on sci-fi's big three awards in 1984, winning the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award.'"

5 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Re:160 million copies!? by JackSpratts · · Score: 5, Funny

    it sold 160 million copies, by the year 6010. it was in the footnotes.

  2. Re:Amazon, here I come! by mihalis · · Score: 4, Funny

    This looks like something I ought to buy.

    If you want to follow the spirit of the book, find a copy of the text illegally on-line and download it to your phone!

    Also, this is my first first post ever!

    Welcome!

  3. Re:Might read this again by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 4, Funny

    Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?

    As an open implementation of .NET Lisa Overdrive, I thought it was a pretty good attempt, although, as usual, it's a slavish imitation of a paradigm invented by others and released in closed-source format long ago. What's especially weird in this case, though, is that the Lisa, which stole shamelessly from XEROX PARC, had to be overclocked in order to be able to run the bloated .NET Framework, which itself, erm, "borrowed" many toolkit widgets that came out of over nearly decades of Macintosh development, which itself obsoleted the original Lisa project --- only to be being re-implemented in the opensource Mono project so that it could be run on a non-Windows OS stack. Talk about chasing your own tail. Especially since OS X has been out for about a decade, and XCode makes everything else pale by comparison.

    --
    You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
  4. Re:Never forget the lesson of Neuromancer by SirLurksAlot · · Score: 4, Funny

    What, you're telling me I can't get rich from fencing 4MB of memory on the street? Way to shatter my dreams of being a hot interface cowboy!

    --
    God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
  5. Re:Pay Phones by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Funny

    And which is why I find his work so incredibly boring. If I wanted to read about a shanty town, I'd go buy a book called "poor people".

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.