ABSTRACT
While the study of cyberspace is itself a recent discipline, the term not having existed before 1984, there are some obvious precursors that have contributed to the field. The rapid development of electronic and computer courses following the Second World War was concerned with the production of computer hardware and (at a later date) software that would power what was to become the new economy. At this early stage, government and university institutions such as Stanford, ARPA and MIT provided probably the most important hothouses for incubating new ideas, with significant contributions from commercial organisations such as IBM and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, important theoretical innovations such as the transistor, Ethernet and the graphical computer interface were developed into commercial products that slowly transformed the post-war environment of the information society.
