Eric Gullichsen was there for all of it — the NASA Ames visit that sparked Autodesk's VR lab, the sluggish 386 rigs pushing six frames per second through a VPL EyePhone, the Timothy Leary hangouts, the letter from Gibson's lawyers. This is a primary-source correction of one of the internet's favorite origin myths, and it lands with the quiet authority of someone who doesn't need you to believe him. The story most people know goes like this: Autodesk trademarked 'cyberspace,' Gibson got mad, Gibson trademarked 'Eric Gullichsen' in retaliation. It's a perfect anecdote — corporate overreach meets literary wit — which is exactly why it spread. Gullichsen's account is more interesting than the legend. Autodesk did apply for the trademark. Gibson did object, through lawyers. But the retaliatory trademark was pure Leary: an incorrigible prankster circulating a rumor that John Perry Barlow embellished and Rudy Rucker amplified until repetition made it true. What makes this worth reading isn't the debunking — it's the texture. The VR lab nicknamed 'Cyberia.' The conciliatory letter to Gibson that ended with his own line thrown back at him: 'The street finds its own use for things.' Gibson's laconic comeback in a Barcelona hotel lobby: 'Autodesk is not the street.' These are details that only survive in the memory of people who were in the room, and Gullichsen writes them down with the offhand precision of someone who lived through the moment before it became mythology. The piece also functions as a snapshot of a very specific cultural window — 1989-1990 — when virtual reality was a few hundred polygons on an ISA bus, when Leary was connecting the counterculture to the digital frontier, and when the word 'cyberspace' was still new enough to fight over. The Art Futura 1990 trip to Barcelona, the cava-fueled reconciliation, the visit to Gaudí's Park Güell (whose lizard appears in Gibson's Count Zero) — these are the details that give the period its grain. Gullichsen's voice is the piece's engine. There's no score-settling, no self-aggrandizement, no attempt to claim more significance than the story warrants. He was there, he saw what happened, he's telling you. The snarkiness of his letter to Gibson is acknowledged without apology. The resolution — 'we'd put the matter behind us, or close enough' — has the honesty of someone who knows that real-life disputes don't end in clean narrative arcs. The deeper value here is as a case study in how internet folklore forms. A prank by a famous prankster, embellished by a famous essayist, amplified by a famous novelist, repeated until nobody checked. The correction matters less for Gibson scholars than for anyone who's ever watched a plausible anecdote harden into 'accepted history' through sheer repetition. Gullichsen doesn't moralize about this. He just lays out what happened.
