1992! God Stephenson got a lot spot on. His vision of what is now the present is compelling and his writing is quite the match ‘burned their brains to ashes in the radiant heat of their imaginings’ (c.f. Howl?), ‘like putting on crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies’, ‘it is a tornado, high pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily through a wall of fishhooks’.
I found the comparisons between language and programming languages especially exciting, regardless of how they may not hold up to academic review.