Cyberthon No. 1 - virtual reality fair in San Francisco

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1990 by Richard Kadrey

ON OCTOBER 6 AND 7, for twenty-four straight hours, the Whole Earth Institute turned the sound stage of San FrancisCO's Colossal Pictures into the world's biggest virtual-reality fair. Almost four hundred people got the chance to see and experience a whole range of reality-bending technologies close up. Over three hundred lucky lottery winners got the chance to don goggles and gloves and actually enter virtual worlds created by teams from Autodesk, Senses and Jaron Lanier's VPL.

The presenters at the Cyberthon were a mixed bunch, performing reality shifts using everything from sleek number-bashing miniCoMputers to Sony Walkmans. By the end of Cyberthon's twenty-four-hour run, sleep deprivation, caffeine, sugar and sensory overload had cracked the edges of many participants' personal realities. People were calling Cyberthon "the Acid Test of the nineties" and "Nerdstock." As a cultural event, Cyberthon had clearly served its purpose. For the first time, the people who are creating cyberspace technology, such as Jaron Lanier, Randy Walser, Warren Robinette and Tom Furness, and the people who think about it, such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Terence McKenna, had been brought face to face. Cyberthon was an unprecedented day and night of crossfertilization. Where it will lead us, who knows? We'll have a full repoet with lots of photos in the next issue.