William Gibson coined the term cyberspace when he sought a name to describe his vision of a global computer network, linking all people, machines, and sources of information in the world through which one could navigate as through a virtual space. The original definition from his futuristic novel Neuromancer is:

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding...." [Gibson, 1984]