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Everyone seems to be talking about cyberdecks. At the risk of mixing up sci-fi genres, that's a name that I've not heard in a long time. No, cyberdecks aren't a Star Wars thing. Instead, the term was coined by William Gibson in the 1984 near-future dystopian cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer.

In the novel, hackers, called "console cowboys," would use cyberdecks to hook up to cyberspace (another term that Gibson came up with, two years earlier in a short story called Burning Chrome). In the book, they're described as custom-built, rectangular, deck-like computers with red and green LEDs that are used to jack into the matrix (yes, Gibson used that term too).

Similar devices have also appeared in movies such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, and Alien.