Gibson did not write "prior to the PC era", whether you mean PC either to be "personal computer" or IBM's brand. I was using both by 1984. He was writing prior

Gibson did not write "prior to the PC era", whether you mean PC either to be "personal computer" or IBM's brand. I was using both by 1984. He was writing prior to the Internet as we know it existed, though (although its precursor ARPANET already did). As for Stephenson, he was writing parodies of cyberpunk, not cyberpunk itself, and unlike Gibson, his work required no foresight of the future because he just had to look around existing geek culture to get his ideas -- online communities and multi-user dungeons already existed by 1992.