The milieu was a seditious, infectious expectation that an unrestrained Internet would liberate information from the control of the philosophically monolithic media. Others daydreamed of landless tax-free sovereignties where citizens chose their allegiances based on personal preferences. Serious thought was going into issues like encryption and private money along the Austrian economists' model. Behind it all, of course, was the long game -- the Metaverse.

There seems, ironically, far less discussion of VR today than there was then and the very term has a distinctly cheesy ring to it now. VW for virtual worlds, in fact, seems to have replaced VR among serious researchers, as has been pointed out by one them: Edward Castronova. Similarly, the libertarian dominance of the net world no longer exists, though its imprint persists as a bias in favor of an unregulated Internet among activists such as EFF and net celebrities such as Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds.

As an example of that initial Silicon Valley culture, I remember a party in a private home somewhere in the Valley held about the time Netscape launched. It was attended mostly by people who were working on immersive VW systems, and had been well before Snowcrash or Lawnmower Man. Timothy Leary was there as well as a Japanese television crew, interviewing developers for a market already obsessed with its own cyberpunk anime like the 1987 classic Baburugamu kuraishisu, or Bubblegum Crisis.

As far as I know, none of those VW projects survives today, but not because the technology did not exist to allow their success. While processor speed and bandwidth were not ready for a fully-blown real-time metaverse, the more important limiting factor was the market. People, even the early adoptors who downloaded Navigator betas, were simply not ready for such a radical transition. It is largely forgotten, or was never known by most people, that some of Netscape's earliest browsers contained incredibly advanced and visionary groupware and 3D browsing features that have not yet appeared in Microsoft's IE or even Firefox.