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The Land of Dreams |
Ever wondered what Cyberspace really was? The press talk about it all the time, but they've got no real idea what it is. They've got some wierd-arse ideas about this glorious place full of 3D graphics and lots of net junkies wired by some plug into their brain. Rooms full of people with zero hygene because they're jacked in all day long. Electronic equivalents of today's drug cases.
Well, the cyberspace of the future may look like that, but I'm betting it won't even come close.
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Plenty has been said about the hacker culture and where it came from, its values and what it does. There's no need to repeat that. What is of interest here are those that dream of the complete cyberspace - William Gibson style and all that entails.
If you look back through the sci-fi world, the origins of known cyberspace can be traced back to a novel called Shockwave Rider. In it, a computer hacker rides the outlaw trail as authorities try to catch him in the classical enemy of the state type plot. Throughout the novel he constantly accesses a computer network amazingly similar to today's Internet. These terminals place him as part of another society and all sorts of tales surround it that programmers today are still trying to replicate. The end of the tale is about how he escapes by unleashing a worm on this network. The first book to mention a virus. The Xerox PARC Worn (predates Morris' Internet Worm by at least 10 years) was named after the idea expressed in this book.
Skip forward a few years. 1984 and William Gibson writes Neuromancer. He does so on a clunk typewriter. In it, he coins the term Cyberspace and defines what it is - a collective of people around the world plugged into a graphical network. Again, overtones of the Internet can be heard wringing in the distance. The center-piece character Molly, is not wired in, but all of her companions through the trilogy are. First young Case and then Count Zero are immersed and consumed by Cyberspace, doing their stuff completely wired. In this world, the 3D structure is built directly from the size and type of the data hooked in. AI defence systems like the Black Ice protect the virtual properties and can kill if required. There is no boundary between real and virtual. In the final book, a new artifact arrives. This is Count Zero himself uploaded into the virtual world. His heart stops but he lives.
Next on the list is Neal Stephenson with Snow Crash. Again, similar Internetish overtones can be heard. However, this guy knows about computers and their potential. The same sort of plugged-into-the-world storyline pervades the novel. This time, a computer virus spread by the network is rewiring the brains of the hackers that have been the ones responsible for building most of the virtual universe.
At the other end of the scale, Orson Scott Card writes a book called Ender's Game. In this, a young kid is purposely bred to be the ultimate military commander. It details his childhood, from his perspective going through Battle School (an idea that is picked up by the US Military for training) and beyond. Near the climax he begins training as a commander on what he believes is a glorified simulator. Patterns emerge, he controls and commands and wins. In the dying pages it is revealed that the game was in fact real life. He'd beaten the enemies of the earth while being ensconsed in a computer game. This profoundly effects young Ender Wiggins and the remaining three books of the series details the rest of his life dealing with what he'd done.
So where does this leave us? All his background is necessary to illustrate the influences on the people who are looking at building some future form of cyberspace. Wander into any VR newsgroup or mailing list and it will be rare that you find somebody that hasn't read at least one of these books. Frequently, they've read all of them; and then some.
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So back in our community of the networked VR junkie, that dreaming takes on the form expressed in the various novels like Neuromancer. The raw material that fed the fires were these novels. People strived to build cyberspace in all its BlockBuster Movie glory.
Did you know that 3D graphics have been around almost as long as 2D? The first Siggraph was held in 1974 when people were interested in what formed 3D graphics on a 2D tube. The reason that we're not today working with a 3D display is that its expensive to produce. That is, to render a 3D cube on screen requires something like 1000 times more processing grunt than doing a 2D square. That sort of power costs dollars, large sums of dollars. Also, the ideas sown up in Neuromancer and earlier novels of AI entities also wanted infinitely more computing power. Somewhere, one or both were going to loose interest from research dollars. Heck, the XT was barely able to draw a straight 2D line, let alone a 3D fully rendered cyberspacial experience.
The rise of Linux and the whole Open Source phenomenom serves as an an example of how this works. Linus does something useful, handy to others, many others and now he gets flown around the country to speak to others while getting paid in real money to do so. However, he's not just some paid-up commentator. He has written a lot of code. People within the kernel development list pay attention to what he saids. Code speaks louder than anything else. Someone's sig I recently read was "Show me the Code!" - an obvious rip off, but it speaks volumes for the basic ethics of what we are dealing with here.
Now, why has linux become what it is today? One thing is that it was a cool thing to play with for many years before anyone really knew what it was. Another was the GPL licensing of the code which stopped it gaining proprietary derivatives (See the various BSDs and BSDI for examples here). The one last major contributor is the Bizzare development model Not just using the bizzare,but also having a decent leading light
Technology and Pleasure: Considering Hacking Constructive http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_2/gisle/index.html
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