The Cyberspace Rumor

From the first days of the web, people have repeated the story that Autodesk trademarked "cyberspace" and Gibson retaliated by trademarking "Eric Gullichsen".

Autodesk Cyberspace

In 1989, I was working at the Autodesk Research Lab on early virtual reality, a project started after we visited Scott Fisher at NASA Ames. Our nascent system was a 386 with a pair of Matrox graphics cards on the ISA bus, a VPL EyePhone, a Polhemus tracker, and a data glove. It ran at six to ten frames per second on models with a few hundred polygons. Sluggish, but marginally enough to get us Through the Looking Glass.

Our motto was “Reality Isn’t Enough Any More”.

Timothy Leary

I was also spending a lot of time hanging out with Timothy Leary, whose suggestion was responsible for my quitting my job at MCC and moving to California. I’d met him at the Hackers 2.0 conference in 1986 and gave him a ride to the San Jose airport. We became fast friends, and I did quite a lot of writing with him, most of which remains unpublished. But that’s a story for later. Timothy, who appears in a samizdat Autodesk virtual reality video, nicknamed our VR lab “Cyberia”.

Timothy was a tremendous fan of Gibson, and considered his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer extremely prescient about the impending digital revolution.

As our VR developments crept slowly towards becoming a product, we at Autodesk applied to register a trademark “cyberspace”. Timothy informed me Gibson was plenty miffed about this, so I wrote him what I felt was a conciliatory letter,¹ though ending snarkily by quoting his own words, “The street finds its own use for things.”

In reply, Gibson had his lawyers send Autodesk a letter². Which I recall we ignored.

Timothy - ever the incorrigible prankster - circulated the rumor that Gibson was attempting to trademark “Eric Gullichsen” in retaliation. Then Barlow, for reasons of his own, embellished that rumor. Later amplified by Rudy Rucker.

Art Futura 1990

About a year later - after I'd already left Autodesk for my VR startup, Sense8 Corporation - we were invited to the inaugural Art Futura 1990 in Barcelona. And there, in the lobby of some swank hotel, I met Gibson. He opined in a laconic drawl that although the street finds its own use for things “Autodesk is not the street”.

There was plenty of cava consumed in the small hours before the time Barcelonans sit down to eat endless rounds of tapas. As I recall, after all the many Art Futura parties we'd put the matter behind us, or close enough.

And there was a memorable visit to Gaudi’s Park Güell, whose giant lizard of crazy-quilt ceramic appears in Count Zero.

So: Autodesk did apply to register Cyberspace, and Gibson really did object. But Gibson trying to trademark Eric Gullichsen was Timothy Leary's prank, propagated until it became accepted history.