I didn’t think it would take me so long to get to book number six for the year, seeing as how I sped through everything last year. This time around, though, I’m in the middle of revising a rough draft and I’m whittling away at my DVD collection along with reading novels.
For the longest time, while reading Microserfs, I got the feeling that it wasn’t as good a read as jPod. It took me much longer, and some of the concepts were outdated, but when I got to the end of it I came to the conclusion that it might, in its own way, be even better.
The book begins in late 1993 and runs until January of 1995, a period of time where I was slowly becoming more and more obsessed with technology. My fascinations were directed more at word processing, game playing and general screwing around rather than actually learning to code, which wouldn’t present itself to me until around 2000 and in such a poor fashion that I never really gave it my full attention. The characters in Microserfs, however, are fully immersed in the world of corporate coding farms and the Bill Gates deification that almost always tagged along back then.
Wave after wave of nostalgia hit me while reading Microserfs. I remember the commercials the characters bring up constantly, the Play Doh and Lego, the sugar cereal and megacorporations and clothing labels. I remember the current events, the celebrities, the earthquakes and fires on the news. So much of this book seems like it was yanked out of my life that it feels surreal, like pulling memories out of a dark corner that I wasn’t aware held anything at all.
Fast food is addictive but about as bad for you as a bunch of simultaneous chest x-rays.
Apple was, and always shall be, the height of cool.
Lego are impressive, but the claw-like hands on their little people (minifigs) are creepy as hell.
Not too long after this book came out I would wind up owning the much-ridiculed (in the novel and in my life) Geo Metro. It really didn’t have the capacity to kill anyone, or even so much as bruise.
This was like prematurely opening up a time capsule full of VCRs, fax machines, early-stage cell phones, GAP khakis, laptops, processed foods, Crystal Pepsi, Melrose Place and ramen noodles and going “Oh yeah, I remember this stuff. Man, weren’t those the days!”
I’m not going to delve into it in too much detail, but lest anyone think this book is some shallow jaunt down memory lane (or, around its publication, a piece of pop culture masturbation) let me say there is a very subtle but noticeable human undercurrent present at all times that comes out in full force towards the end.
Man, I miss the 90s.
5/5
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