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Its a bit off topic, but I am curious about a bit of slang used. John Perry said "... sounds rather like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix ... ". I'm fa

by luke_s 15y ago

Its a bit off topic, but I am curious about a bit of slang used. John Perry said "... sounds rather like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix ... ". I'm familiar with project Xanadu and for a moment I just presumed "the matrix" was a reference to the movie. But then I realized the e-mail was sent in 1991 ... What did he mean by "the matrix"?

DanielKehoe 15y ago
I love John Perry Barlow's use of language. As you guessed, he was referring to Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu hypertext project. "The Matrix" was a term used by researcher John Quarterman (and the title of Quarterman's seminal book) to designate the totality of all the world's computer networks, which in 1991 were not all linked together (FidoNet, the Internet, DECnet, others long forgotten). As far as I know, Quarterman appropriated the term from William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where "the Matrix" was the global computer network that was the locus of cyberspace. I think Barlow, in his visionary way, was referencing Neuromancer. The Wachowski brothers' borrowing of the term "the Matrix" for their 1999 film corrupted a term that had meaning in the early 1990s. Now, shall we say, it is deprecated.