We crossed the oceans of megabyte
When the diskettes start to burn like candles
I usually think of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) as the prototypical Cyberpunk work, but of course it wasn’t even Gibson’s first story set in the Sprawl (1981’s Johnny Mnemonic) or the first one featuring his videogame-like Cyberspace (1982’s Burning Chrome).
Meanwhile, Vernor Vinge’s 1981 cyberpunk novella True Names featured a slightly different take on the ultimate computer user interface; one that ‘evoked’ images in a person’s mind rather than a visual field of pixels, and was conceptualised in terms of magic. Of the two writers, Vinge was the only one working as an actual computer scientist at the time, and would have experienced first-hand the pseudo-anonymity of computer chat forums that we now take for granted as ‘the Internet’.
Finally, in 1982, Disney released the movie Tron, taking place inside a computer from the viewpoint of programs, and giving a third popular fictional impression of ‘cyberspace’ based on mythology and analogies to videogames. Wikipedia suggests that development of Tron began as early as 1976, as a response to the popularity of Atari’s 1972 hit videogame Pong.
(It’s fascinating to think how long it takes for technology to migrate to popular culture: in the case of Pong to Tron, about 10 years. So the seeds of cyberpunk, even in its earliest fictional form, would likewise go back to the early 70s. What’s being sown now, in the years after Snowden, I wonder?)
On the music front, in Germany, Kraftwerk had also been doing weird things to synthesizers since the very early 70s – their breakthrough album Autobahn came out in 1974 – so it’s not surprising, I guess, that by 1982 Germany had a strong synthpop / New Wave / dance scene.
The German band Boytronic was also, and much more creatively, known as ‘Bryllyant Berger and the Tronic Twins‘ which has to be a pretty good cyberpunk name right there. To be honest their music, like much of the era, is mostly dance and doesn’t do much for me.
(Their initial 1983 hit You demonstrates why the 80s New Wave synthpop period was so short-lived: keyboards and dancing do not go together. You have to love the ‘expensive electronic hardware in burned-out urban wasteland’ vibe of the set though.)
But it’s one track from their followup 1983 album The Working Model, which intrigues me. It’s still just a dance track, wearing out its welcome after about a minute and a half. But for theme it goes right for the cyberpunk lingo mixes elements from Burning Chrome/ Johnny Mnemonic, True Names and Tron in a way I’ve not seen anywhere else, in English language, quite so early. Computer interface as knights and dragons, the story told from a program’s perspective, and the whole thing catching fire. Is there more cyberpunk than that? No. None more cyberpunk.
Okay they ARE pronouncing megabyte as ‘meegabyte’, but a megabyte was still a mythological figure for most consumers in 1983, something reserved for mainframes or minicomputers. The IBM PC/XT, with its 10MB hard drive, would only ship in August of that year (in America, that is; in New Zealand, hard drive machines would remain unaffordably expensive for several more years, and things were probably similar in the UK and Europe).
Red chips – burning, burning…
We crossed the oceans of megabyte
When the diskettes start to burn like candles
The data enter shows the warning light
“This program is to hot to handle”
Red chips – burning, burning…
We beat the knights of interface
And crushed the dragons of both poles
But our program lost the trace
I hope our user saved our souls