alt Hacker Newsthis guy speaks a lot with people who know where things are headed technology wise and somehow is so good at understanding potentials and implications. u know he wrote neuromancer on a typewriter because appearently he does/did not like computers (atleast back then).
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Gibson is a trend spotter. He doesn’t look at technology, he looks at people and culture (he is notably interested in fashion). It’s easier to see what’s happening when you pay attention to who’s doing the thing and what they’re doing, as opposed to what it’s being done to.
It wasn't that he didn't like computers at the time, he didn't have money for a proper word processing setup. Something good enough to write a full length novel on in 1981 with a printer and the commercial word processing software would have been the equivalent of $3500-4500 or more in today's money adjusted for inflation.
Neuromancer was written between 1981 and 1984. The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.
(Consider, for example, that the first chapter of Neuromancer alone would have exceeded the stock memory capacity of many personal computers at the time, at ~46 kB.)