Snow Crash is parody literature, but the fantasy is built around very good predictions about the future. He coined the word "avatar" for virtual characters, and the book contains a direct inspiration for google maps.
I was always under the assumption that they independently coined the word. At the very least, "avatar" wasn't well-known until Snow Crash came out, so it's possible Stephenson didn't know it was an existing word and came up with it for the same reasons as Farmer and Morningstar. It's also a near-certainty that the wider tech community only adopted the word "avatar" after reading it in Snow Crash due to the book's popularity, so even if he didn't independently co-coin the word, he's still the one who popularized it.
(if you're familiar at all with TVTropes, the latter is the difference between the concept of a Trope Maker and a Trope Codifier)
> I was always under the assumption that they independently coined the word.
I guess it's possible? I certainly hadn't heard of Habitat in 01992, or indeed until after I met Chip, and the correspondence with the Hindu concept is quite arresting. But then again, I never had a Commodore 64, and Neal Stephenson always loves to be plugged into everything that's trendy. Farmer and Morningstar gave a paper http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html at The First International Conference on Cyberspace in 01990, which seems like the kind of thing you would maybe go to if you were writing a novel like Snow Crash in 01990. But they say Habitat (or rather Club Caribe) only had 15000 users at the time.
> (if you're familiar at all with TVTropes,
I love TVTropes! If we're talking about the cyberspace avatar trope rather than the use of the word "avatar" for it, you could maybe trace that back to Vinge's 01981 True Names, as mentioned in the talk I linked above.
Yeah, of course I didn't mean they invented the word, just a new sense of it. It isn't the literal sense from Hinduism because game players aren't gods, and because typically the characters they play in the games don't exist until the players incarnate in them, but it's clearly a metaphorical extension of the Hindu concept, as explained in the article I linked above.