William Gibson, according to his blog, wrote Neuromancer, the first of his ‘Sprawl Trlogy’ on a hand-me-down Hermes 2000 typewriter like the one pictured above. Gibson had never owned a computer at the time he wrote the first of his seminal cyberpunk novels. My classmate Sandy Frazier, another very capable writer, has famously never owned a computer – he continues to use typewriters, mainly used Olympias (as I recall).

Gibson also points to the Steampunk Typewriter, which looks like someting out of The Difference Engine, which he co-wrote with Bruce Sterling. I remember reading that Gibson saw an Apple IIc ad on a billboard while waiting for a bus in San Francisco. The very concept, a portable computer, was all he needed to project the whole world of Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero…

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