It was an experience indeed. At many points, very high concept (which of course has been copied to death). At other points, naive. Surprisingly few things felt old fashioned.
The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where everything revolves around the main character.
EDIT: To clarify, I liked the book very much.
And it bears remembering that Gibson was 34 when he wrote Neuromancer.
You can see a shift in his characterization by the time he gets to Mona Lisa Overdrive (a book and 4 years later). And certainly with the subsequent Bridge trilogy. IMHO, the Sprawl trilogy that starts with Neuromancer gets better with each book, even though the first is the most famous.
Also, plug for Void Star, which I recently finished after a recommendation here. It sits somewhere in Bridge-era Gibson tone, but with the quintessential "What the hell is going on?" Cyberpunk mystery that a lot of retro-CP authors drop. https://www.amazon.com/Void-Star-Novel-Zachary-Mason/dp/1250...
Don't remember Mona Lisa Overdrive very well but the whole A plot with the girl being protected because she has a modem in her head was a bit hard to follow. Though once again great world building. The B plot with an older Molly Millions delivering The Count's cybersarcophagus in the desert was cool af though.
edit: that's not to say they're not fine books
While DoD declared TCP/IP the future standard for military networking in 1982, IBM, DEC, and AT&T only adopted TCP/IP in 1984, a couple of months before Neuromancer went on sale. Gibson notoriously wrote it on a manual typewriter circa 1982-83. (It took a year from acceptance to put a novel manuscript into production back then: very often, it still does.)
ARPAnet existed in 1982, Public BBSs had been a thing for a while. But the publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence? That was all in his imagination.
Those three come quickly to mind that were certainly trying very hard to be the " publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence" you are speaking of.
While the others did, Gibson seemed not to have been aware of them, and he didn't even own a computer at the time.
You can tell his vision of cyberspace came entirely from his imagination because it doesn't even remotely resemble any actual computer systems of the day.
We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that many drugs with reputations of illegitimate/illegal use are readily provided to patients (including children) in a pharmaceutical context, most notably amphetamines and opiates.
Hence "speed with a PG rating".
I don't think being unkind to molecules is something to worry about, they can't be offended.
Writing is like any pursuit, you just need to do it to develop and become better at it. Just like coding.
I feel it's like this for two reasons:
1) Gibson himself says that he hasn't been a very good writer making Neuromancer, and that this is one of his weaker works,
2) but then again, we see the world from the POV of the protagonist and his brain filter. Case is not a very complicated man and this is how he sees the world. He chooses to focus on these things, and he treats people around him like NPCs. (Giving a convincing perspective of a character is what good writers do, so I think Gibson wasn't a shitty writer after all.)