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| First Written | 1993 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | Perennial |
| My Copy | library copy |
| First Read | April 08, 2025 |
Microserfs
A stream-of-consciousness pseudo diary from a programmer in the 1990s, who moves from the solid MSFT job (boring, predictable) to a Silicon Valley startup (???) as they build a proto Minecraft. You think reading a book about young people that practically live on the campus at their cushy tech job would feel absolutely current. And it does, until every once in a while the author says something like ‘I need to visit my parents so I called a travel agent and VISAed a plane ticket’.
Noted on April 8, 2025
Karla doesn't like my being friends with Ethan. She says it's corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I'll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.
Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into "Marvins" and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.
Quoted on April 8, 2025
"Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity?…”
Karla came into the room at this point. She turned off the TV set and looked at Todd square in the eyes and said, "Todd: you exist not only as a member of a family or a company or a country, but as a member of a species-you are human. You are part of humanity. Our species currently has major problems and we're trying to dream our way out of these problems and we're using computers to do it. The construction of hardware and software is where the species is investing its very survival, and this construction requires zones of peace, children born of peace, and the absence of code-interfering distractions. We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an earthly paradise the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line, prevent humanity from going nonlinear."
Quoted on April 8, 2025
Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spread-sheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?
Quoted on April 8, 2025
It's really young at Nintendo. It's like the year 1311, where everyone over 35 is dead or maimed and out of sight and mind.
Quoted on April 8, 2025
I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with three bowls of Cap'n Crunch— had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day. It hurt like crazy, and it made me talk with a Cindy Brady lisp until late afternoon.
Quoted on April 8, 2025