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Comment by cstuder | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: Snow Crash featured a software called 'Earth', a complete 3D view of the earth. Which inspired a company called Keyhole to write something like that. Which got later bought by Google and that product is now known as Google Earth.

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... and which is now building the goggle interface device (Project Glass) that Hiro Protagonist used to great effect.

Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?

One of the things that really attracted me was Snow Crash's very 90s idea that your plot of land in the Metaverse was run from your own computer. Of course, it didn't turn out that way and now everything is moving to the cloud.

Hey, the cloud is always online and my instances are mine. If I were running my website from my computer, it would be down every time I went into the subway.

Presumably in the future connectivity will be much better than it is now, though I don't deny that there are real benefits of cloud hosting.

I think Project Glass is probably closer to Manfred Macx's data glasses from Accelerando

no, they'll take over minecraft. Much better to take a ridiculously simple system where anyone can build anything, and grow it into the full 3d design system of second life.

Stephenson comments on this in Reamde.

Yeah, that was amusing and caused me to rewind the audiobook and verify what I'd just heard. Reamde "rips off" Google Earth, but that just basically ripped off "some sci-fi novel" anyway so it's okay. Kind of like the moment in the Ready Player One audiobook where Wil Wheaton reads about future Wil Wheaton being elected as basically co-president of the Internet.

There was a mostly-terrible interview with Stephenson on GoodReads where the one redeeming factor was getting to hear Neal's thoughts on Snow Crash these many years later:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/video_chat/14

I was surprised that Snow Crash wasn't the main inspiration, I learned from Ken Jennings' "Maphead." Instead, Powers of Ten is, though Snow Crash is somewhat involved. See: http://www.realityprime.com/articles/notes-on-the-origin-of-...

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