Where did metaverse come from?

Metaverse was created in the early 1990s by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash. It's a virtual world that exists within the Internet, and is populated by avatars of people from the real world. Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors, and I'm always fascinated by the ideas he comes up with. In Snow Crash, he predicted many things that have since come true, such as online social networks, e-commerce, and Augmented Reality. Metaverse is one of his most creative ideas, and it's amazing to think that it all started with a novel.