7 ms·

At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways t

At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.

AdamN 3mo ago
It's sort of a cool idea. "Pre-RAM" without the tracking/AI integration so it can be used for clandestine activities in a dystopian future.
- kilpikaarna 3mo ago
  It's 3MB of "hot" RAM, IIRC. Makes sense.
ecshafer 3mo ago
Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.
- dfedbeef 3mo ago
  3MB of RAM but 120PB of storage. Sure you're paging a lot but
  - bigbuppo 3mo ago
    Make your secondary storage smarter.
- neonmagenta 3mo ago
  I remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.
  - goodmythical 3mo ago
    To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.
  - sublinear 3mo ago
    It's probably still an accurate size for pharmacological test data.
- satnhak 3mo ago
  I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.
  - disillusioned 3mo ago
    Windows 95 was originally delivered on 14 1.44MB floppy disks...
- refulgentis 3mo ago
  "Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything." -- this isn't true, much less the stuff layered on top (conciousness!?)
- brnt 3mo ago
  Maybe there is a parable here: don't fear the man that wants thousands of gigabytes, fear the man that only wnats 3 MB.
- xg15 3mo ago
  Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?" The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.
  - ecshafer 3mo ago
    Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.
  - justaman123 3mo ago
    Do you think there's a possibility of getting more efficiency from existing hardware if it was used the same way that smaller amounts of RAM and processing were used in the past. Or because the rest of the computing landscape is so full of bloat it wouldn't even make much of a difference?
- MadnessASAP 3mo ago
  I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.
- dvngnt_ 3mo ago
  Well it was before electron was created so all they knew were efficient native applications
- grantcas 3mo ago
  [dead]
jonathanlydall 3mo ago
Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way). I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something). The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power. Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU. Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.
- pedrocr 3mo ago
  > The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power. Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.
  - deeringc 3mo ago
    I completely agree. With everything from Out-Of-Order execution, deep pipelines, SIMD, huge CPU cache, etc... I would be surprised if the performance increase is not considerably more than 1024x.
  - martinald 3mo ago
    GPUs are even more extreme. A 5060 is something like 15,000x faster than a 3dfx Voodoo card from ~2000 by my limited research.
fredsmith219 3mo ago
That is a pretty nitpicking reason to say it has not aged well. Hamlet doesn’t have cell phones yet I think it’s an excellent play. Even though a quick FaceTime would’ve averted a tragedy.
- craftkiller 3mo ago
  So many plots in Seinfeld would have been trivially solved with cellphones. Get separated in the parking garage? Call each other. Need help carrying an armoire? Call each other. Trying to meet up at the movie theater? Call each other.
  - mrweasel 3mo ago
    You still see this in many newer movies. If they are set in the present step one is "oh no, we have no cell service". There are so many movies and TV shows where the plot doesn't work if you have cell service or internet access.
    - fc417fc802 3mo ago
      The lack of effort on the part of writers really ruins my enjoyment. Yes I thought I saw a suspicious person down a dark alley so I will silently separate from my group to go investigate on my own oh no who could possibly have foreseen this murder happening?
- soiltype 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - nullstyle 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ewild 3mo ago
      Is this ironic are we actually calling shit talking llms bigotry?
bartread 3mo ago
It's funny... I enjoyed Neuromancer, although I didn't read it until about 15 years ago. And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to. At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, realistically, more than 1MB of RAM in machines you'd typically see sat at home or on a desktop was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s. And, although Moore's law had been around since 1965 it's hard to know how aware people outside of specialist circles would have been of it in 1984. I suppose Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? But the memory thing is sort of ancillary to the story, so how much would he really have focussed on that? Probably not much. And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic? Doesn't seem right. I think the sensible position is you have to let it slide and see it as a possible alternative future that never quite came to pass in that way but that which we can see strong echoes and foreshadowings of even still. [0] In 1984 microcomputers, as opposed to, cough, "serious" computers like the PC and Mac, with 128K of RAM were still very new, with 32 - 64K being the entry level, and if you had one with 128K you were king of the hill. 128K in 1984 seemed like a ton of memory to most of us, but it's worth bearing in mind that only a handful of years before computers like the ZX81, which had only 1K of RAM, were the common entry level, so the progression was already clear if you looked at the situation in the right way, but you had to have been paying attention for a while to have noticed. I remember the first time I used a machine with 4MB of RAM in, maybe, 1990 - an Archimedes at school - and feeling like it was just this absolutely inexhaustible ocean of memory. In 1984 3MB would have felt almost inconceivably huge unless you were in the high performance computing, or maybe the mainframe, worlds.
- nottorp 3mo ago
  > But then Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars? > And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing about memory when, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic. He seems to understand humans. Gibson's world and Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar are imo the most "prophetic" sf books written so far.
mNovak 3mo ago
If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.
- moomoo11 3mo ago
  this is my issue with cyberpunk “literature” it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types. it’s all uninformed fear mongering
  - rf15 3mo ago
    It's certainly Literature. Shouldn't the quotes be more like '"cyber"punk literature', considering your complaint?
    - moomoo11 3mo ago
      the games are more interesting imo. like deus ex or even cyberpunk 2077
  - msie 3mo ago
    Then you should have a problem with science-fiction in general.
  - momoschili 3mo ago
    on the contrary it's important for these people to be unencumbered by the technology of today to imagine the future. Imagine thinking in 1900 about flying, or even going to the moon in the context of what existed back then?
  - GuB-42 3mo ago
    What is the issue? It is fiction, it doesn't pretend to represent reality in any way. It is more about badass cyborgs than it is about fear mongering. But it is dystopian fiction, a genre that has its roots in real society problems turned up to eleven. It is not realistic, but it tends to feel real because of how psychology works, the negativity bias in particular. Same idea with 1984, pure fiction, looks nowhere near modern society, but people will go out of their way to find similarities.
gchamonlive 3mo ago
Can't you just read "3 MB of RAM" as a large amount of some scarce tech resource and move on? What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.
- mrob 3mo ago
  "High compression memory" is immersion-breaking magic. There are hard mathematical limits to how much you can compress things (Kolmogorov complexity), and every lossless compression algorithm necessarily increases the size of some inputs (pigeonhole principle). It's much simpler to assume that "M" is slang for some bigger unit. We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).
  - fc417fc802 3mo ago
    > We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20). Off topic nit but that's not slang rather it's an example of conflicting technical jargon with an added helping of religious zealotry.
aaroninsf 3mo ago
I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to <whatever would make a contemporary reader be impressed> Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever. As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris. Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation... ...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard. Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.
- snowwrestler 3mo ago
  And the bank of pay phones is one of the coolest little scenes in the book. Put me on team “don’t update the text.” Books are written in their contemporary cultural contexts. LeGuin said speculative fiction is about today even if the story is set in the future, and I agree. So when you read Neuromancer, in some ways you’re reading a book that is about the 1980s in the U.S. So there are more fundamental anachronisms than just RAM and payphones, like a belief that east Asia had a lock on the future of advanced technology. Or that punk culture was cool and edgy and would endure.
  - aaroninsf 3mo ago
    Oh, sure, I am 100% not on team "quietly/secretly update the text" eg in ebooks... ...I was more thinking of this as an interesting "art" project of sorts, adjacent maybe to an annotated edition where readers can opt in to a different kind of experience. For me the most interesting bit wou;d be the problem-space of how to "translate" the cultural signification across time, which I think we would agree is literally (heh) impossible and a dubious and Quixotic goal. I think it was in The Mind's I that the open question of whether in translating Tolstoy one could and should re-situate the novel in London for English readers, or, re-situate Dickens novels in Paris for the French edition, etc... ...all of this just forces one to confront literary theory in a productive way. Because I enjoy such theory and also absurdism it does feel like it would be fun to try in particular to produce an automated PKD-esque black-box automaton which duly tries via "AI" mechanisms to produce candidate translations for us of exactly those aspects of something like Neuromancer which are most significantly coupled to the time place and framing of its writing, the landscape of features that were most problematic (comical!) to translate would I think also be a neat heatmap reflective of our cultural evolution from/diversion from that time place and framing...
teddyh 3mo ago
In early computing history, the unit of memory was not established yet, and different hardware architectures had different word sizes, not even necessarily evently divisible by 8. And the memory sizes of these machines used to be expressed using the naitive word size. Like “this machine has 8 kilowords of core”. Therefore, when I encounter an anachronistic memory size in old fiction, I just assume that I just don’t know the word size they are using.
- walrus01 3mo ago
  Gibson was also not a microcomputer enthusiast at the time he wrote the book, and didn't know much about the inner workings of PCs that ordinary people could afford with a regular amount of money in the late 70s/early 80s. As I recall he said he wrote the book on a typewriter. He's also on record as saying that the first half of the sequel in the series (Count Zero) was also written on a typewriter. edit: But regarding your specific comment, it's true that memory size wasn't totally consistent in how it was described or marketed. But in terms of computers that you could purchase and fit in your house, if you look at things similar to Byte magazine from 1982, 1984 or whatever, it was pretty consistent that desktop microcomputers were specified in multiples of KB of RAM like a 64KB or 128KB commodore (or at the very low end 16KB or 32KB for something you would attach to your TV), or IBM PC/Clone that would ship with 512KB or 640KB or 1MB of RAM, and the more expensive ones having multiples of 1MB, 2MB, etc.
  - teddyh 3mo ago
    The first home computers were all 8-bit machines, and memory sizes were therefore always specified in terms of 8-bit bytes. (This use then continued as the home computer market grew, and later completely dominated the field as mainframes declined.) But earlier, non-home, computers were as I described.
- marcosdumay 3mo ago
  The ALU of a computer with a megabit word must be a beast to awe upon!
- em3rgent0rdr 3mo ago
netburst 3mo ago
3MB of "hot" RAM, stored in a cryogenic flask - a cold boot attack. He isn't selling RAM, he's selling data.
ColdStream 3mo ago
Side note. It is sort of the unwritten rule in TV and Film. Don't highlight technology unless absolutely necessary. it can age it considerably. A few weeks back I had '30 Rock' on, it was funny seeing everyone with flip phones, it wasn't highlighted but it just makes you realise the age of it all.
- ryanmcbride 3mo ago
  I always just find stuff like that charming. I love seeing relics of the time in which something was made. I love seeing dated pop culture references, it's one of my favorite things about engaging with old media.
- paulddraper 3mo ago
  Same with monetary amounts. Movies in 1950s: "For this heist you will receive a fantastical sum of $100,000." Nowadays: "$100,000 is a mediocre downpayment in the suburbs."
  - bcraven 3mo ago
    Austin Powers hung a lampshade on that very effectively: Dr. Evil: Mr. President, after I destroy Washington D.C. I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour. That is, unless, of course, you pay me [emphasis] Dr. Evil: one hundred billion dollars. The President: [bursts with laughter] Dr. Evil, this is 1969! That amount of money doesn't even exist. [laughing] The President: That's like saying, [with changed voice] The President: "I want a kajillion bajillion dollars."
- philsnow 3mo ago
  I don't keep anything on my phone anymore. I use gadzorp.
m463 3mo ago
It's funny that some of the more hand-wavy books are closer to what is happening.
rldjbpin 3mo ago
as memory cycle goes, my money is on the eventual oversupply, and somehow websites will take gigabytes per tab in the end!

AdamN 3mo ago

It's sort of a cool idea. "Pre-RAM" without the tracking/AI integration so it can be used for clandestine activities in a dystopian future.

kilpikaarna 3mo ago
It's 3MB of "hot" RAM, IIRC. Makes sense.

ecshafer 3mo ago

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

dfedbeef 3mo ago
3MB of RAM but 120PB of storage. Sure you're paging a lot but
- bigbuppo 3mo ago
  Make your secondary storage smarter.
neonmagenta 3mo ago
I remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.
- goodmythical 3mo ago
  To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.
- sublinear 3mo ago
  It's probably still an accurate size for pharmacological test data.
satnhak 3mo ago
I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.
- disillusioned 3mo ago
  Windows 95 was originally delivered on 14 1.44MB floppy disks...
refulgentis 3mo ago
"Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything." -- this isn't true, much less the stuff layered on top (conciousness!?)
brnt 3mo ago
Maybe there is a parable here: don't fear the man that wants thousands of gigabytes, fear the man that only wnats 3 MB.
xg15 3mo ago
Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?" The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.
- ecshafer 3mo ago
  Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.
- justaman123 3mo ago
  Do you think there's a possibility of getting more efficiency from existing hardware if it was used the same way that smaller amounts of RAM and processing were used in the past. Or because the rest of the computing landscape is so full of bloat it wouldn't even make much of a difference?
MadnessASAP 3mo ago
I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.
dvngnt_ 3mo ago
Well it was before electron was created so all they knew were efficient native applications
grantcas 3mo ago
[dead]

jonathanlydall 3mo ago

Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way). I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something). The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power. Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU. Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.

pedrocr 3mo ago
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power. Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.
- deeringc 3mo ago
  I completely agree. With everything from Out-Of-Order execution, deep pipelines, SIMD, huge CPU cache, etc... I would be surprised if the performance increase is not considerably more than 1024x.
- martinald 3mo ago
  GPUs are even more extreme. A 5060 is something like 15,000x faster than a 3dfx Voodoo card from ~2000 by my limited research.

fredsmith219 3mo ago

That is a pretty nitpicking reason to say it has not aged well. Hamlet doesn’t have cell phones yet I think it’s an excellent play. Even though a quick FaceTime would’ve averted a tragedy.

craftkiller 3mo ago
So many plots in Seinfeld would have been trivially solved with cellphones. Get separated in the parking garage? Call each other. Need help carrying an armoire? Call each other. Trying to meet up at the movie theater? Call each other.
- mrweasel 3mo ago
  You still see this in many newer movies. If they are set in the present step one is "oh no, we have no cell service". There are so many movies and TV shows where the plot doesn't work if you have cell service or internet access.
  - fc417fc802 3mo ago
    The lack of effort on the part of writers really ruins my enjoyment. Yes I thought I saw a suspicious person down a dark alley so I will silently separate from my group to go investigate on my own oh no who could possibly have foreseen this murder happening?
soiltype 3mo ago
[flagged]
- nullstyle 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ewild 3mo ago
    Is this ironic are we actually calling shit talking llms bigotry?

bartread 3mo ago

It's funny... I enjoyed Neuromancer, although I didn't read it until about 15 years ago. And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to. At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, realistically, more than 1MB of RAM in machines you'd typically see sat at home or on a desktop was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s. And, although Moore's law had been around since 1965 it's hard to know how aware people outside of specialist circles would have been of it in 1984. I suppose Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? But the memory thing is sort of ancillary to the story, so how much would he really have focussed on that? Probably not much. And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic? Doesn't seem right. I think the sensible position is you have to let it slide and see it as a possible alternative future that never quite came to pass in that way but that which we can see strong echoes and foreshadowings of even still. [0] In 1984 microcomputers, as opposed to, cough, "serious" computers like the PC and Mac, with 128K of RAM were still very new, with 32 - 64K being the entry level, and if you had one with 128K you were king of the hill. 128K in 1984 seemed like a ton of memory to most of us, but it's worth bearing in mind that only a handful of years before computers like the ZX81, which had only 1K of RAM, were the common entry level, so the progression was already clear if you looked at the situation in the right way, but you had to have been paying attention for a while to have noticed. I remember the first time I used a machine with 4MB of RAM in, maybe, 1990 - an Archimedes at school - and feeling like it was just this absolutely inexhaustible ocean of memory. In 1984 3MB would have felt almost inconceivably huge unless you were in the high performance computing, or maybe the mainframe, worlds.

nottorp 3mo ago
> But then Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars? > And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing about memory when, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic. He seems to understand humans. Gibson's world and Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar are imo the most "prophetic" sf books written so far.

mNovak 3mo ago

If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.

moomoo11 3mo ago
this is my issue with cyberpunk “literature” it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types. it’s all uninformed fear mongering
- rf15 3mo ago
  It's certainly Literature. Shouldn't the quotes be more like '"cyber"punk literature', considering your complaint?
  - moomoo11 3mo ago
    the games are more interesting imo. like deus ex or even cyberpunk 2077
- msie 3mo ago
  Then you should have a problem with science-fiction in general.
- momoschili 3mo ago
  on the contrary it's important for these people to be unencumbered by the technology of today to imagine the future. Imagine thinking in 1900 about flying, or even going to the moon in the context of what existed back then?
- GuB-42 3mo ago
  What is the issue? It is fiction, it doesn't pretend to represent reality in any way. It is more about badass cyborgs than it is about fear mongering. But it is dystopian fiction, a genre that has its roots in real society problems turned up to eleven. It is not realistic, but it tends to feel real because of how psychology works, the negativity bias in particular. Same idea with 1984, pure fiction, looks nowhere near modern society, but people will go out of their way to find similarities.

gchamonlive 3mo ago

Can't you just read "3 MB of RAM" as a large amount of some scarce tech resource and move on? What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.

mrob 3mo ago
"High compression memory" is immersion-breaking magic. There are hard mathematical limits to how much you can compress things (Kolmogorov complexity), and every lossless compression algorithm necessarily increases the size of some inputs (pigeonhole principle). It's much simpler to assume that "M" is slang for some bigger unit. We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
  > We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20). Off topic nit but that's not slang rather it's an example of conflicting technical jargon with an added helping of religious zealotry.

aaroninsf 3mo ago

I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to <whatever would make a contemporary reader be impressed> Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever. As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris. Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation... ...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard. Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.

snowwrestler 3mo ago
And the bank of pay phones is one of the coolest little scenes in the book. Put me on team “don’t update the text.” Books are written in their contemporary cultural contexts. LeGuin said speculative fiction is about today even if the story is set in the future, and I agree. So when you read Neuromancer, in some ways you’re reading a book that is about the 1980s in the U.S. So there are more fundamental anachronisms than just RAM and payphones, like a belief that east Asia had a lock on the future of advanced technology. Or that punk culture was cool and edgy and would endure.
- aaroninsf 3mo ago
  Oh, sure, I am 100% not on team "quietly/secretly update the text" eg in ebooks... ...I was more thinking of this as an interesting "art" project of sorts, adjacent maybe to an annotated edition where readers can opt in to a different kind of experience. For me the most interesting bit wou;d be the problem-space of how to "translate" the cultural signification across time, which I think we would agree is literally (heh) impossible and a dubious and Quixotic goal. I think it was in The Mind's I that the open question of whether in translating Tolstoy one could and should re-situate the novel in London for English readers, or, re-situate Dickens novels in Paris for the French edition, etc... ...all of this just forces one to confront literary theory in a productive way. Because I enjoy such theory and also absurdism it does feel like it would be fun to try in particular to produce an automated PKD-esque black-box automaton which duly tries via "AI" mechanisms to produce candidate translations for us of exactly those aspects of something like Neuromancer which are most significantly coupled to the time place and framing of its writing, the landscape of features that were most problematic (comical!) to translate would I think also be a neat heatmap reflective of our cultural evolution from/diversion from that time place and framing...

teddyh 3mo ago

In early computing history, the unit of memory was not established yet, and different hardware architectures had different word sizes, not even necessarily evently divisible by 8. And the memory sizes of these machines used to be expressed using the naitive word size. Like “this machine has 8 kilowords of core”. Therefore, when I encounter an anachronistic memory size in old fiction, I just assume that I just don’t know the word size they are using.

walrus01 3mo ago
Gibson was also not a microcomputer enthusiast at the time he wrote the book, and didn't know much about the inner workings of PCs that ordinary people could afford with a regular amount of money in the late 70s/early 80s. As I recall he said he wrote the book on a typewriter. He's also on record as saying that the first half of the sequel in the series (Count Zero) was also written on a typewriter. edit: But regarding your specific comment, it's true that memory size wasn't totally consistent in how it was described or marketed. But in terms of computers that you could purchase and fit in your house, if you look at things similar to Byte magazine from 1982, 1984 or whatever, it was pretty consistent that desktop microcomputers were specified in multiples of KB of RAM like a 64KB or 128KB commodore (or at the very low end 16KB or 32KB for something you would attach to your TV), or IBM PC/Clone that would ship with 512KB or 640KB or 1MB of RAM, and the more expensive ones having multiples of 1MB, 2MB, etc.
- teddyh 3mo ago
  The first home computers were all 8-bit machines, and memory sizes were therefore always specified in terms of 8-bit bytes. (This use then continued as the home computer market grew, and later completely dominated the field as mainframes declined.) But earlier, non-home, computers were as I described.
marcosdumay 3mo ago
The ALU of a computer with a megabit word must be a beast to awe upon!
em3rgent0rdr 3mo ago

netburst 3mo ago

3MB of "hot" RAM, stored in a cryogenic flask - a cold boot attack. He isn't selling RAM, he's selling data.

ColdStream 3mo ago

Side note. It is sort of the unwritten rule in TV and Film. Don't highlight technology unless absolutely necessary. it can age it considerably. A few weeks back I had '30 Rock' on, it was funny seeing everyone with flip phones, it wasn't highlighted but it just makes you realise the age of it all.

ryanmcbride 3mo ago
I always just find stuff like that charming. I love seeing relics of the time in which something was made. I love seeing dated pop culture references, it's one of my favorite things about engaging with old media.
paulddraper 3mo ago
Same with monetary amounts. Movies in 1950s: "For this heist you will receive a fantastical sum of $100,000." Nowadays: "$100,000 is a mediocre downpayment in the suburbs."
- bcraven 3mo ago
  Austin Powers hung a lampshade on that very effectively: Dr. Evil: Mr. President, after I destroy Washington D.C. I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour. That is, unless, of course, you pay me [emphasis] Dr. Evil: one hundred billion dollars. The President: [bursts with laughter] Dr. Evil, this is 1969! That amount of money doesn't even exist. [laughing] The President: That's like saying, [with changed voice] The President: "I want a kajillion bajillion dollars."
philsnow 3mo ago
I don't keep anything on my phone anymore. I use gadzorp.

m463 3mo ago

It's funny that some of the more hand-wavy books are closer to what is happening.

rldjbpin 3mo ago

as memory cycle goes, my money is on the eventual oversupply, and somehow websites will take gigabytes per tab in the end!