Alex Pang is working on the very intriguing topic of "The End of Cyberspace" (there is a short piece about it in Wired today). In one of his blogposts, he's wondering about the names that we given to cyberspace (the ultimate goal is to find a new concept for what is now cyberspace: ubicomp...). Concerning cyberspace names, I looked back at some old role playing games I had both in english and french, dated from end of 80's and 90's. There are names like 'virtual world', "the grid', "the matrix", "cyberspace" and so forth. Sometimes, the names of the artifacts gives the idea of the concept (in "information superhighway" that I really like, it makes me remembering by grandmother who kept asking me "where are those superhighways").

An important thing I guess is the difference or the mix between the idea of a virtual space and its physical representation (as for instance a network of cable or fibers) and the virtual counterpart (information flow).

About this, it's interesting to see that the first representations of virtual reality embed the concept of the cyberspace architecture (in a more perfect way of course). Networked virtual reality is made of wires/cables/fibers (to connect computers) and it's really represented as a grid/matrix. Check those pictures (Space Harriers and Tron):

The ground of this virtual space is - actually - a grid.