er security
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and thieves.

This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s. It concerns
activities that take place inside computers and over telephone lines.

A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in 1982,
but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a
hundred and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where a
telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone,
the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone,
in some other city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The indefinite
place OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet
and communicate.

Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place.
Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This "place"
is not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of
people have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of
public communication by wire and electronics.

People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now. Some people
became rich and famous from their efforts there. Some just played in
it, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and
regulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued
one another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for
years. And almost since the beginning, some people have committed
crimes in this place.

But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once
thin and dark and one-dimensional--little more than a narrow
speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone--has flung itself open
like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie
light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld
has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the
world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and
television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace,
nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It
makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.

Because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a few
technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal
people. And not just for a little while, either, but for hours
straight, over weeks, and months, and years. Cyberspace today is a
"Net," a "Matrix,"