i'm watching this:
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

and i keep thinking how much of it seems similar to the matrix presented in sr1 to sr3 (and to some degree still is there with sr4, tho with the RTH and LTG layers not being talked about its less noticable).

Consider something like fidonet:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/FidoNet

a organized group of bbs's passing messages and stuff between them. In a way it reminds me of how the denver nexus and the various shadowlands where organized.

Not sure if this is what you're asking, but the inspiration for Shadowrun's take on VR is William Gibson's depiction of "cyberspace" (a word he coined, BTW) in his novel Neuromancer.

Ah, memories.

I ran a three year long PBM roleplaying game over FidoNet at one point.

And wasted WAY too much time on door games like LORD.



-k

I dont think thats the only source. The rules system was to elaborate to be based only on that book. Especially once one start looking at the RTG and all that stuff.

The basic idea of plugging the brain into some keyboard like thing (funny thing is, Gibson never had them use plugs. It was all trode nets. Only person using a plug was one main characters mon in count zero) perhaps, but the details where not there.

There were other similarities to SR1 and SR2. Cyberspace is called a mass consensual hallucination, and in it the "layout" of the matrix resembles the layout of the actual networks in real-space, which is what SR1-2 did for the most part. Nodes in cyberspace are geometric shapes, like pyramids and most often cubes. Most likely why data-stores in SR1-2 are cubes. The major difference is in the depiction of ICE, which gibson describes as walls or something like a force field around the nodes that has to probed for week points (ports are my guess). Black ICE was most definitely psychotropic in the books, as Dixie describes how it would make you confess your digital crimes to the reps of a Zaibatsu corp all that you had done (and perhaps more).

They adapted a lot from Neuromancer.

Shadowland even used to be called the "Shadowland BBS". That's how the net looked like back then, and of course it had a heavy influence on how the authors imagined the future.

If you look at the flowcharts that programmers use to plan out system functions, Shadowrun 1.0 matrix topology looks astonishingly like 3D versions of the flowchart symbols.




-k

I think Doctor Who did it first.

Double the Post, Double the Fun

Who?



-k

Exactly.

I think CP2020 had alot of influence on SR's cyberpunk components.

Given that the Cyberpunk RPG and Shadowrun 1st Edition came out at almost the same time, I don't think they were ABLE to influence each other.

Mostly both drew from the various Cyberpunk novels and some films.



-k