Old Email Archive

digest 1996-08-05 #001



11:24 PM 8/5/96 -0700
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
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Date: 5 Aug 1996 14:01:11 -0700
From: caroline nachman 
Subject: earliest concept of "cyberspace?"
what was the earliest recognition of "cyberspace?"  was it
really
the author, william gibson?  i suspect it was much earlier.
thanks
caroline
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Date: 5 Aug 1996 14:57:03 -0700
From: Ann Weinstone 
Subject: Re: Earliest conception of cyberspace
I don't know if you mean "conception" or the earliest coinage
of the word.
As far as conception goes, in Western thought what about reaching back
(not much of a reach) to the Timaeus--Plato's matrix? D. Porush has
written several articles in which he talks about cyberspace as the
zone/nest of the irrational homologus to the post-Pythagorean Eudoxus'
discovery of irrational numbers in the zone between rational numbers.
As for coinage, it seems Gibson did indeed coin the word. In SFS #68,
Brent Wood writes a bit about Gibson's piece "Academy Leader"
in which he
traces, albeit ambiguously, the trail through Burroughs that brought
this
word into being.
Ann Weinstone
Stanford University