My one-woman Douglas Coupland literary festival continues with Microserfs, published by Coupland in 1995 and set in the early 1990s.  It perfectly captures what life was like in the high tech industry in the early and mid 1990s, just as the bubble was really starting to inflate, and excitement was just beginning to build in earnest.

It's sometimes difficult to read Microserfs on its own merits, and not as a historical document.  The first half of the book is set on the Microsoft campus, where we meet a group of geeks (including the narrator, a programmer named Daniel).  The early 1990s were arguably the height of Microsoft's power, even though it would gain more market share later in life.  

This is Microsoft as a pure software company, before the advent of the internet as we know it.  In the setting of the book, the web existed only in a rudimentary fashion.  For the most part, "the internet" was email and Usenet.  The Mosaic browser (released in 1993) was state of the art.  The biggest (possibly only) meaningful religious schism was between Microsoft and Apple.  When people said "PDA" they meant Apple's Newton.  Neither Amazon nor eBay would exist until 1995, and Google wouldn't hit the scene until 1998.

As I read, I kept getting distracted by the term "information superhighway," which was thrown around a lot in the years before anyone really knew what we would use the internet for.  I remember being thoroughly sick of the term, and it was funny to encounter it again.  

When was the last time you heard it?  I'm willing to bet it's been a while.  It's interesting that "information superhighway" lost currency once the web became truly useful.  I guess it was just a marketing term all along, trying to sell us a bill of goods to a mysterious and largely undeveloped world.

"Multimedia" is another term that crops up a lot, and always made me smile.  Back in the early 90s, everyone thought that "multimedia" would be the next gold rush.  No one really knew what "multimedia" meant.  Most people assumed it would somehow combine a book and a movie, and maybe some music.  At any rate, that's another term that largely died off in its original sense.

If you can get past the "Aw, we were so cute back then!" factor, Microserfs is a book about family, our relationship to our bodies, and how the single-minded dedication required to be a programmer in a start up is not always healthy.  It explores these themes well, if a little too earnestly at times.  I could have used a lot more showing and a lot less telling.  For example, Dusty's story arc, from hard core female body builder to new mother, was a thousand times more compelling than all of Daniel's talk about his girlfriend's theories about how we store our memories in our bodies.  

Anyway, I would not rush to read Microserfs again.  Except that I do have to give it props for the line, "Type-A personalities have a whole subset of diseases that they, and only they, share, and the transmission vector for these diseases is the DOOR CLOSE button on elevators."  This was a wonderful flash of Coupland Classic - snappy, observant, and witty - and Microserfs could have used a lot more of it.