i just wanted to hang out in the suburban 90s again for a while and this delivered. endlessly quotable, prescient, also surprisingly heartfelt and touching.

Microserfs is one of Coupland's most populair books with a certain cult-status.

The thing which I not really liked, was that that this book contains too much software-terms. A typical "Douglas" with different kind of funny people and their singular qualities.
Typical "Coupland's" were as well the dialogue's and the way the characters go on with each other....When I read it a few years ago, I can remember it was just too sweet for me.

Maybe it was not the right moment to read, right then.

I can remember I liked Generation X and Shampoo Planet a lot more.
But it's not bad, absolutely not! This book is funny, and especially for the one's who are more familiar with software and the computer-business, it's a big surplus. (Then in the early 90's)

It reads like a very long blog post -- so much so that I feel it couldn't be far removed from a very-detailed autobiography of a Microsoft employee who moved down to Silicon Valley to be part of a startup. I had just moved to Silicon Valley when I read this, and was astonished at how detailed the descriptions of local streets and freeway clovers were; even the description of Fry's in Palo Alto as an oasis of components was so accurate I found it less of a crafted novel and more like an ambling letter.

I have a lot of affection for the author. I found the early allusions to leet-speak quite amusing, as it was written much before this came into the mainstream.

Read this in a night - super fun - made me nostalgic for a time in history I didn't experience.

Such fun... I especially loved the idea of someone locking himself in his office and only eating flat foods that can be inserted under the door. I think of this book every time I open a slice of American cheese!

Fun little throwback.

Unhealthy, obsessive, yet unusually brainy coders are the subject of this '90s culture-examining novel. Describing a career at Microsoft as utterly soul deflating, Dan Underwood and his nerdy mates escape to begin developing their own, new, interactive, mutimedia computer program named Oop!. A rollicking adventure of cultural insight and comical genius follows, one with all the emotional understanding of Jane Austen, and the sardonic humour of a more coherent Irvine Welsh. Wacky postmodernism never read so good.

https://5cense.com/21/864.htm

I have read Microserfs probably 4-5 times over the years and I really just love this book. I can't even tell you exactly what it is, but I just enjoy every minute of it. My favorite Coupland book, for sure.

Geeky, existentially thought-provoking, heart-warming and simply delightful.

What starts out as a chipper, Big Bang Theory-esque circus of geeks unexpectedly reveals itself to be an often mournful novel about the cavernous loneliness that lives deep within the hearts of those who seek to create a technological future that could exist without us.

Technology is now so inextricable from the quotidian- and from the very moment of our birth- that it is easy to forget that the implementation and function of these technologies have been dictated by things as human as ideologies of grievance and the stupidity of the corporate class. Coupland is often hailed as a uniquely prescient harbinger of impending technological dooms, especially after the publication of Generation X, and it’s safe to say that such a clairvoyance is present here as well, particularly when he talks about work’s remit beginning to invade the private and personal life (hello 6pm texts from my boss!). In this, it’s so interesting to get a glimpse of what life was like as the different skeins of the modern technological world were still being developed, even ideated, and to feel the tension of those pullulating possibilities.

A criticism that I see levelled against this book on here is that Dan is an unexciting narrator. But, in Coupland’s portrayal of Dan as a QA Tester of unexceptional ability and meso-nerd interpersonal skills, I think that it’s perfectly realistic. He sometimes fumbles as a narrator and crosses from the mundane to the sensitive or personal rather hastily, but what techie do you know that doesn’t have some kind of literary hamstring? In this, I think the vulnerability and honesty in the book is endearing, and I’m very glad to have read it.

A novel in journal form about a group of Microsoft employees who leave the company to found a Silicon valley startup.

Douglas Coupland is what I think of as a zeitgeist writer. He captures the spirit of the times we live in by setting his novels in those places that history will look back upon as trend-setting, avant-garde cultures. Silicon Valley in the 1990’s is a prime candidate, if not the clear winner. Though it hasn’t lost any of its luster, Silicon Valley doesn’t hold the same power over mediatic senses now as it did then, simply because it’s now been around for a while.

Reading about the 1990’s nerd culture is a nostalgic trip. If you were there at the time, and happened to find yourself in a field not too distant from technology and (here’s a 90’s term for you) multimedia, you find yourself nodding your head frequently while reading this, sometimes laughing out loud.

The characters are a hodge-podge of geekism from the era. There’s a bodybuilder geek (two of them, actually), a suave marketing geek, a recovering anorexic, an ageing previous-generation IBM software guy, a hermit-like visionary, a geek mother, a closeted gay geek, a Canadian rough-and-tumble geek, and of course the narrator, a run-of-the-mill generic geek whose importance in the story is to be relatable, therefore not too extremely geeky.

These characters find themselves living together in the Valley and forging their group into an extended family, discovering themselves and the world outside of Microsoft communally. The narrator is the quintessential flaneur in that he seems to be the kind of person who everybody confess themselves to, and as such becomes the eyes and ears of the reader as the author does a far-ranging show and tell of life in the 1990’s, tech and corporate culture, Seattle, San Fransisco and the Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, technology, relationships, mass media, gender, etc. It slides and hops from one thing to the next, through brief anecdotes and heavy interpretation from the narrator or another character delivering analysis in thoughtful a partes.

The result is a lightly-toned, yet intricately weaved, information-heavy traversal of an economically ebullient period of history. It’s about technology, but it’s mostly about people and how they relate to it, how they tie it in with their past and their sociological makeup. The characters come to life fast and believably, and their diversity makes their commonality even more appreciable.

Often touching, always (alarmingly) smart.

Oh and, without giving anything away, I add that the ending blew me away. Nerds are people, too.