Around that time, however, the Apple IIc appeared. For me, it appeared on the miniature billboards affixed to bus-stop shelters. This seductive little unit, looking not that much bigger, really, than your present day Powerbook, was depicted dangling from a handle in the hand of some unseen suit with a nicely-laundered cuff. Portability! Amazing! A whole computer in a package that size! (I didn't know that you had to lug the monitor around as well, plus a bulky little transformer and another disk-drive that weighed nearly as much as the computer itself.) These Apple ads were the direct inspiration for the cyberspace decks in Neuromancer. Like the Hermes 2000, the IIc, in its day, was quite something.

Not that I ever experienced it in its day, not quite. My Hermes died. Some tiny pawl or widget caved in to metal-fatigue. No replacement could be found. I'd just started Count Zero. I gave the typewriter man $75 for a reconditioned Royal desk machine, a hideous truck-like lump of a thing with an extended carriage that alone weighed twenty pounds. It had an extended carriage, he said, because it had belonged to a little old lady who'd only ever used it to type mimeograph stencils for Sunday-school programs. (Though I suspect many of you may not know what "mimeograph stencils" were.)

I stuck with this ghastly clunker through Count Zero, but as it came time to begin Mona Lisa Overdrive, I went shopping for a computer. Bruce Sterling's father had given him his old Apple II, and Bruce allowed as how it was a pretty convenient way to put words in a row. Remembering those bus-stop ads, I bought myself an Apple IIc. This was around 1986 or so, and the IIc had long-since been eclipsed by various proto-Macs, which everyone assured me were wonderful, but which I regarded as prohibitively expensive. I bought a IIc in an end-of-line sale at a department store, took it home, and learned, to my considerable disappointment, that personal computers stored their data on little circular bits of electromagnetic tape, which were whirled around to the accompaniment of assorted coarse sounds. I suppose I'd assumed the data was just sort of, well, held. In a glittering mesh of silicon. Or something. But silently.