But it was interesting that he saw them as being portable "decks," which sounded like laptops with sophisticated graphics capabilities. I believe he wrote this in the early 80s, when portable computers were "luggables" and had little more than green or amber screens that were meant for displaying text:
Yeah I was also interested to hear his 'console cowboy' for what we'd now call a hacker. I was reading one of his newer books called Pattern Recognition... it came out well before the iPad, and yet in it he's describing an 'iBook' tablet computer device as more widely used than the laptop.
http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/l/luggable.htm