Dawn Of Cyberspace

Cyberspace. A word that is commonplace in present times. Ever wondered how it came into being? How and when did this word that describes an undefinable realm first appear in our vocabulary?

Although the word ‘Cyberspace’ rings a modern and futuristic tone in our heads, the word ‘Cyber’ was birthed from a word so ancient that it can only be found in the Greek version of the Old Testament from the Bible!

When looking at the inception of ‘Cyber’, we trace the family line back to the word ‘Cybernetics’ which was the first derivation, even before ‘Cybersecurity’. So it all started with the Greek word kubernētēs and kubernēsis, which is deciphered as ‘steersman’ and ‘gifted governance, leadership’, thus bringing to mind a ship steering through the unknown waters of the future.

To sum up, we have the Greek OG ancestors; Kubernētēs and Kubernēsis, from whom dawned ‘Cybernetics’ in the late 1940s, then came along ‘Cybersecurity’ and ‘Cyberpunk’ and finally we arrive at the great grand-child; ‘Cyberspace’, born in the 1980s.

The first time the term was used will come as a surprise. One would think that it was coined by a great computer scientist in a sophisticated lab after months of research. Well, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

A science fiction author while writing a cyberpunk short story would use the term for the first time in history. William Gibson carved his name in cyber history by using this word, which seemingly emerged on his page as he wrote the story Burning Chrome(1982). It certainly throws new light on the immense power a string of letters and the literary world hold, the power to change history, and the gift to become immortal.

Now, what does ‘Cyberspace’ actually mean? After its birth, the word became widely in association with the internet. And in the 1990s, a time when the internet was an unexplored place of mystery and little was known of this global phenomena, ‘Cyberspace’ came to be defined as a social setting existing entirely within a computer space, a virtual realm synonymous with the World Wide Web.

It was only later that ‘Cyberspace’ came to mean a technology that facilitated various functions such as signals, connections, etc that work to form a virtual experience that can be viewed anywhere on earth.

As Bruce Sterling in his book, The Hacker Crackdown so clearly explains the term,

"Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. [...] in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.”

Read more at History of Cyberspace