Abstract :
This year was the 25th anniversary of the publication of William Gibson¿s award-winning novel, Neuromancer. It may be hard to remember that the world in 1984 was very different than today. Everything today is interconnected through the Internet, and data and applications are moving into the ¿cloud.¿ The Web is taken for granted as part of modern life. Googling for information is second nature. Today¿s Internet would have been beyond most imaginations when Neuromancer was written. In 1984 the ARPANET was still a closed network for researchers and academics around the size of 1000 hosts. The U.S. National Science Foundation contracted the construction of CSNET based on TCP/IP to MCI. Transmission links were upgraded from 56 kb/s to 1.5 Mb/s T-1 lines. The Domain Name System (DNS) was being introduced. The Web would not be conceived until five years later, and the network would not be opened up to commercial traffic until eight years later. At the time, PCs were running at 8 MHz with 128 kbytes of RAM.
