Origin of word "matrix" used to describe a virtual reality environment?

Question

What's the origin of the word "Matrix" used as either a name or a description of a virtual reality environment? The best known example is of course from the film of the same name, and it's widely reported that the name in this case was taken from Gibson's Neuromancer, but this is predated by the similarly named computer system on Gallifrey in Doctor Who (first appearing in the episode The Deadly Assassin in 1976, several years before Gibson started publishing). Are there any earlier occurrences, or is this the origin of the word?

Answer 1

There are no earlier references given in the "matrix" entry on the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction site (an offshoot of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction), I think it's likely the researchers for the Dictionary would have turned up any if they existed. So, there's a very good chance The Deadly Assassin (1976) is the first example of "matrix" being used to mean "cyberspace or virtual reality" (though see some possible doubts about its meaning in Doctor Who in the edit below), although of course the word itself has earlier meanings (it's used in mathematics, and in biology to refer to some kind of source where something grows).

edit: On other uses of "matrix" that don't refer to virtual reality, I recently came across this example from chapter 14 of Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future from 1962, discussing the possibility of "replicators" which could duplicate most any consumer good from raw materials (basically the same idea as the replicators from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which may have inspired Gene Roddenberry's use of the term since he once said that Star Trek was strongly influenced by this book):

The advent of the Replicator would mean the end of all factories, and perhaps all transportation of raw materials and all farming. The entire structure of industry and commerce, as it is now organized, would cease to exist. Every family would produce all that it needed on the spot — as, indeed, it has had to do throughout most of human history. The present machine era of mass-production would then be seen as a brief interregnum between two far longer periods of self-sufficiency, and the only valuable item of exchange would be matrices, or recordings, which had to be inserted into the Replicator to control its creations.

I did a little searching on google books and it seems that what we would now call a computer's memory was sometimes referred to as its "storage matrices" in the early days of computing, see here and here and here for example. This usage may also be the basis for "matrix" in the quote from Solaris that the answer by @Sam referred to, since the character was accusing Hari of being a kind of mechanical reproduction from data that had been gleaned from his own brain.

This also suggests the possibility that in "The Deadly Assassin" (1976), the use of "matrix" may have referred generally to all the data stored in the computer systems of Gallifrey, not specifically to a virtual reality environment. In the transcript here, an engineer on Gallifrey describes the system as

Trillions of electrochemical cells in a continuous matrix. The cells are the repository of departed Time Lords. At the moment of death, an electrical scan is made of the brain pattern and these millions of impulses are immediately transferred to the--

The Doctor interrupts him at that point, who discusses the idea that the Master had extracted a memory from the system and implanted it in the Doctor's mind, and then there is this dialogue where the Doctor suggests "going in" to the Matrix by connecting his brain to it:

ENGIN: Doctor, I simply cannot believe that anybody could do what you're suggesting. How can one intercept a thought pattern from within the Matrix itself?

DOCTOR: By going in there and joining it.

SPANDRELL: You mean a living mind?

DOCTOR: Well, in a sense that's all a living mind is, electrochemical impulses. If I went in there, I could discover where he intercepted the circuit.

And once he is inside, at one point the Doctor says "I deny this reality. The reality is a computation matrix." So I think these lines would fit the idea that the Doctor Who writers just intended "matrix" to refer to the computational system or its data, not specifically to a virtual environment.

In Neuromancer (1984), the term more clearly refers to a virtual environment or 3D visual interface, for example there's this paragraph quoting some sort of educational program that Case is viewing:

“THE MATRIX HAS its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .”

If Gibson is the originator of this usage of "matrix" as a virtual reality rather than a physical computer system, note that he had also used it this way two years earlier in the novelette "Burning Chrome" (1982), originally published in the July 1982 issue of Omni. From p. 74 of that issue:

Bobby was a cowboy and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers' sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing corporate data.

Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they work behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine.

Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind's extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems.

According to Gibson's introduction to story collection of the same name, "Burning Chrome" was written in early 1981, and it was also where he first coined the term "cyberspace" (albeit only a brief reference in the first paragraph to a piece of hardware known as the "Cyberspace Seven"). In Neuromancer it's sort of unclear to me if "cyberspace" and "matrix" are synonyms or if there is a slight difference in meaning--maybe "cyberspace" refers more to the type of virtual space one encounters when jacking into the matrix, whereas "matrix" refers to the entire virtual space and all the structure within it. In the book Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction edited by Larry McCaffery (1991), there's an interview where Gibson talks about the inspiration for cyberspace (p. 272):

I was walking down Granville Street, Vancouver's version of "The Strip," and I looked into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids' eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space games projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there's some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace you can't see but you know is there.

Answer 2

Having just watched the 1972 science fiction film Solaris, I was surprised to hear this dialog.

There is no Hari. She's dead. You're just a reproduction, a mechanical reproduction. A copy. A matrix.

Later in the film this applies to more than a "person" but actually entire virtual environments. Not quite identical to "The Matrix", but some similarities.

Answer 3

It may have to do with the original Latin meaning of the word matrix, which is womb:

If you're inside a virtual world then, you are inside a type of figurative "womb" that you eventually should want to exit to continue your life!

Answer 4

1961, Solaris — Stanisław Lem

The book which Sam's Answer was based on does have a potential reference:

It's not certain however if this is a valid use of the word for the question.