An early description of cyberspace.

William Gibson is well known for coining the terms cyberspace and matrix to describe a virtual reality accessed via computers or some form of technology. The same idea is very nicely developed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash novel, among many others, but the seed of the idea is already present in the Sprawl Trilogy without a doubt:

There is no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor's lecture in the arcology's executive creche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback providing a touch-world of studs and triggers... As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied...

(Gibson: pp. 55-56)

We are still a long ways from the cyberspace described in the cyberpunk novels, but we're definitely getting there pretty quickly. As a matter of fact, with the success of Second Life, we just need a leap forward in the commercialization of already existing immersive technologies coupled with yet another little push in hardware performance. However, that holy grail of the 1980s and 1990s science-fiction seems now within reach. The global reach of the Internet is now a reality in our daily lives. People work from home, share ideas, pictures, videos, watch TV shows and movies and talk to distant relatives thanks to the Internet. All of this would have sounded like science-fiction fantasy to anyone in the first half of the 1980s.