Comment by kbelder

I remember reading a fan-made alternate history for some sort of cyberpunk game setting back on usenet in the day.

The instigating effect that diverged the timeline was some sort of technological innovation around 1983-1984 that allowed an instant leap in CPU speeds and memory densities by many orders of magnitude. The timing of the advancement was such that the IBM PC architecture was hopeless outmoded and soon died off. Apple retrofitted the tech into their Macintosh line, so they stayed relevant, but the Amiga was still in the design stage and so was able to build their new OS and UI around the enhanced capabilities. It went on to dominate computing for the next several decades.

Their version of Amiga Intuition was able to include photo-realistic VR, global networking, massive neural nets, and so forth, which all contributed to the cyberpunkness of the setting.