“I was immediately obsessed with the potential for multiple people to share such a place, and to achieve a new type of consensus reality, and it seemed to me that a “social version” of the virtual world would have to be called virtual reality. This in turn required that people would have bodies in VR so that they could see each other, and so on, but all that would have to wait for computers to get better. I was fifteen years old and vibrating with excitement. I had to tell someone, anyone. I would find myself running out the library door so that I didn’t have to keep quiet; rushing up to strangers on the sidewalk out in the hard New Mexico sunshine.

“You have to look at this! We’ll be able to put each other in dreams
using computers! Anything you can imagine! It’s not just going to be in our
heads anymore!”

I’d then wave a picture of a cube in front of a random, poor soul, and that person would politely navigate around me. Why were people so blind to the most amazing thing happening in the world?”