Decades before Google Glass, Steve Mann created his own augmented-reality goggles, becoming, likely, the world’s first cyborg. From “Eye Am a Camera,” his article from late last year in Time:

“My own engagement in this evolutionary process began way back in the last century in 1978. Thirty four years ago, I invented a ‘glass’ that caused the human eye itself to effectively become both an electronic camera and a television display. I used it to experiment with ways to help people see better, through ‘wearable computing’ in everyday life. I called this invention ‘Digital Eye Glass’ or ‘Eye Glass’ or ‘Glass Eye’ (people wearing it look like they have a glass eye) or just ‘Glass’ for short.

Back in 1978, computers were massive machines requiring large computer rooms. My high school had a computer. It processed stacks of paper cards and printed the results on paper in the next room.

But the personal computer revolution was just being born. My brother and I were the first in our school to have a home computer. And rather than have it sitting on a desk at home, I often wore it on my body, connected to various prototypes of my eye glass.

In some sense, I chose to learn about computing by ‘being’ a computer, and to learn about photography by ‘being’ a camera for more than 30 years. I call this ‘learn-by-being.’

As a teenager in the 1970s, I built a computer-mediated world of ‘augmediated reality.’ This was nothing like ‘virtual reality,’ which ignores the real world. Augmediated reality served to both augment and mediate my surroundings.

My ‘glass’ became so much a part of my everyday life that it became part of me — part of my mind and body. And it evolved from a cumbersome apparatus with some parts permanently attached (portions of its sensory network implanted beneath the skin) to something sleek and slender that slides on and off like ordinary eyeglass frames.”