When science fiction author William Gibson wrote his first two novels, Neuromancer and Count Zero, on a manual typewriter, he knew almost nothing about computers. "When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep," he told the Missouri Review, as quoted in the Whole Earth Review. "Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toaster every time the drive would go on.... Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing ... and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player."

Ironically, Gibson is one of the most innovative science fiction writers to come out of the 1980s. Many critics see him as a central figure in the cyberpunk movement, a science-fiction sub-genre concerned with modern technology and...