Architect of cool

More than quarter of a century later, 1984 remains firmly fixed in the future, fiction having provided a more vivid view than our memories of the year which actually happened.

Even so, a couple of things from the real, boring 1984 were memorable: Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer (with a celebrated advertisement based on Nineteen Eighty-Four) and William Gibson published his first novel, Neuromancer, which popularised the idea of ‘cyberspace’, a term he had minted.