Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:22:John Wilkins...Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Follow the John Wilkins link to find some non-Metaweb biographies and other information about the real Wilkins. His relevance to the Baroque Cycle is as follows: in 1641 he published a book called Mercury, which has been described by David Kahn, in "The Codebreakers," as the first English-language work on cryptology. The Baroque Cycle and my novel Cryptonomicon are both set in a slightly different alternate universe in which Wilkins's treatise was called Cryptonomicon. And just to make things a little more confusing, in the real world is an Internet document called Cyphernomicon, by Tim May, which predates my work by many years!