“The novice had been selected carefully. Once a year, the candidates who had come of age were abducted by a shadowy group of toolmakers, shamans, and artists, whose activities were changing irrevocably the way the human race worked and lived. The mentors took the novices, one by one, down into the cave. (...) The earliest virtual realities on earth were constructed laboriously, by lamplight, deep underground.”

Howard Rheingold in Virtual Reality, 1991, 379.