When the term "cyberspace" was mentioned, I always lost what it really mean. I start using computer since 8 years old, when Internet is still a research tool and not many outside universities have access to it.

To me, computers do "things" for me, might that be helping me write my homework, or provide entertainment. A program runs on it is just a bunch of 0s and 1s that control how it behaves. The behaviour draw information from data and present some result.
In the good old days, the program is running on my Apple, 386, or whatever computer I use. This change in the Internet era; the program might be running on my web server or even a computer half way around the world. The web is just another one of these programs, or "application".

I start to use Firefox as my main browser recently. One of the features it has is tab browsing, which allow many web pages to load on the same instance of the browser. I have one tab to access my server-side RSS aggregator on the server at home. Another tab loads the Nucleus forum that I contribute code to. I also have My Yahoo on, and a few times a day login to gmail to read email.

One day, while jumping from tab to tab reading RSS feeds/news/etc, chatting with friends on MSN/ICQ using gaim, and starting a download from MLdonkey, I suddenly realized they look "the same" to me; A window, or a tab in the browser that present information to me, which I can interact with data somewhere.... they function the same way. It doesn't matter they run over different protocols, remotely or locally. It's a uniform part of a bigger interface, a system as a whole that act as a gateway for me to access information stored in a stream of 0s and 1s.

That's it! Cyberspace is just a collection of user interface/gateway/window to access information and function from computers. How plain simple, common, typical, and ordinary to me. It's like second nature to me, who use this all my life and not aware of what it is. Data maybe from various sources, might that be my local harddisk or from the net. And the programs might be running from thousands of miles away. They are forming a "world" in front of me, or a "view" to this world.

With this view in mind, one can constuct a conceptual view of his version of the cyberspace, or his/her gateway to the Internet and the computer world.

Here's my: