Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?" stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers to the question are no better than a random man on the street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile => Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense like Johnny Mnemonic.

I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.

As the Romans say, "there's no point arguing about taste." I find Gibson's stories hard to follow in some cases, but at the same time he is very inventive when it comes to language and mood. I find it worth the effort. To calibrate, my favorite sci-fi author is a toss-up between Stephenson (wildly entertaining) and LeGuin (digs into human relations and society like almost no other author).