literature."
Novelist William Gibson, who coined the word "cyberspace" in his classic novel Neuromancer, first encountered the Net-as-cloud metaphor while preparing for his first video teleconference. He asked the tech guys how the signals would travel across the Net. It's not going across the Net, they told him. It's going through "the cloud" - through the totality of all the phone links in the world.
"Clouds are numinous," Gibson says. "But the cloud's main usefulness lies in its vagueness, like cyberspace - a word which is also useful for its vagueness. Or perhaps," he adds, "people are thinking of thought balloons in comics."
Jessie Holliday Scanlon and Brad Wieners are editors at Wired magazine.
