I Praise You: Microserfs

Gather round, chitlins, as I tell of the mid-1990s.

I work in an office with people who were, like, twelve during the irrationally exuberant early to mid-1990s, when we used Elm or Pine to check our e-mail and Melrose Place was still on. Now they're bright and shiny 26-year-olds, and I am chronologically eligible for "cougar" according to Urban Dictionary, and we all practically have Feednet. They nod politely and wipe my chin while I dig around fruitlessly for my ringing phone and complain about Newt Gingrich and the second season of Twin Peaks.

So I loaned one of them Microserfs. Like being there, circa 1994.

When I got Microserfs back, I read it again, perhaps for the first time since I was laid off and depressed in 1997 after an intellectual property lawsuit (our team won but was bankrupted), a buyout, and a bad IPO. I was curious to see how it held up ten-some years after.

• In the book, Apple is tottering along, buying out its employees and fretting about the Newton.
  
• Mildly disparaging remarks are made regarding the utility and promise of "the Net" (specifically Usenet) as compared to "the next killer app," yet the book itself is pretty much a blog: epistolary, episodic, intermingling cultural-observational riffs with personal revelation and transformation.
• It's probably a good thing we have evolved some best practices for intermingling cultural-observational riffs with personal revelation and transformation.
• VC guys haven't changed.
• Judging by the spirited conversation I had recently about QWERTY versus Dvorak, geeks haven't changed that much, either.