Even most of the tech in Neuromancer remains fictional; a lot always will because it's not viable, but a lot simply remains in the future because we yet lack the capacity. Placing it a decade or two after the first cyberpunk stories was inherently dated (e.g. the TV/MMB thread announcing Skynet coming online a few days ago), but "twenty minutes into the future" is deliberately dateless. Even where films like Bladerunner specify dates, cyberpunks nature entails a "date" that is "not yet, but very soon... ".

Cyberpunk is fundamentally about how rapidly advancing technology itself, especially information processing technology that drives the rest, changes humans and humanity. That's why it CAN be set in any era, but is best suited to those since the Industrial Revolution. It's also why grafting it on (TVTropes using the same phrase I did amuses me) to a historical era with naught but superficial changes remains just a special case of cyberpunk, not a new literary species. Future tech is just that, in perpetuity, and any specific tech is irrelevant to that. Biosoft revolutionizes technology and society by the end of the series, but the many allusions to its superficial impact are no more than that. It's a foil for demonstrating the importance of Angies dad to Maas, and of Legba, in turn a foil for demonstrating Wintermutes enduring significance, but its real significance in the series is what it enables Angie, Bobby and Wintermute to accomplish at the end. Even the significance of entities like Continuity duplicating Wintermutes autonomy lies not in the autonomous entities, but the resultant relationships and evolutionary consequences like Continuitys transformation from Angies powerful and sinister nemesis to her awkward younger "cousin". Wintermute claims to be "the sum total of the works, the whole show", but continuity is literally the name of the game for the Sprawl Trilogy.

Those are the aspects too easily missed that make much cyberpunk far less dystopian than it appears on the surface; it's classic noir, but it's definitely not all dystopian, and I don't consider the Sprawl Trilogy to be so. Most of humanity usually isn't enslaved and seldom dehumanized (let alone to the extreme degree of the Matrix films), but the people who got their scientific utopias live happily boring lives that are uninteresting reading. After Case makes his bones we never hear from him again except near the end when the Finn tells Molly that he did a few more runs before marrying and having a couple kids; 3Jane won't even TRY going after Case because he's out of the game. Count Zero implies a similar fate for Turner: He settled down in the country with his dead brothers girlfriend, and spent the rest of his days in the grueling and dangerous world of teaching their kid how to NOT hunt squirrels. The characters who stay in the game stay interesting (in cases like McCoy Pauley and the Finn, even when they don't stay alive). In the Sprawl Trilogy even the ones whom technology takes permanently beyond their bodies aren't dehumanized; they lose their physical limitations, but even 3Jane seems to be recovering her humanity by the end (it's a measure of how twisted she is that Continuity progresses faster despite being considerably younger and a machine).