William Gibson will play more than just an inspirational role for this blog. He will also be one of the threads that ties the Past, Present and Future together in it.
To make this first long story as short as possible:
• Between 1984 and 1988, Gibson authored his futuristic Neuromancer trilogy, popularizing the term “cyberspace.”
• In 1991, Apple shipped the first entries in its futuristic PowerBook series of laptop computers.
• In 1992 the Voyager Company brought Gibson’s futuristic trilogy to Apple’s futuristic PowerBooks through a futuristic product they called Expanded Books. Some of the very first e-books!
There were no iPads back then; Apple’s laptops were a perfect platform for the new product category. There was also no readily-available Internet; these first e-books shipped on floppy disks!
•Alan (of course) bought the Neuromancer e-book floppy, along with some others.
•Alan and Priscilla attended a Bay Area talk given by Gibson.
•Gibson signed Alan’s Neuromancer floppy on the front, and penned “DEATH TO PRINT” on the back. Now how cool is that!
(In making the above long-story short, a lot of important Future distribution milestones were glossed over, but they’ll be back later: the very unevenly distributed Internet of the time, the way the PowerBooks’ built-in networking capabilities would help even out that distribution, the HyperCard technology used in these early e-books, and more!)