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Microserfs Tapa blanda – 1 junio 1996
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Opciones de compra y complementos
Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Living together in a sort of digital flophouse --"Our House of Wayward Mobility" -- they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.
Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age.
- IdiomaInglés
- EditorialHarperCollins
- Fecha de publicación1 junio 1996
- Dimensiones13.49 x 2.18 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-100060987049
- ISBN-13978-0060987046
Descripción del producto
Extracto. © Reimpreso con autorización. Reservados todos los derechos.
Microserfs
By Coupland, DouglasReganBooks
Copyright © 2004 Douglas CouplandAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060987049
Microserfs Early Fall, 1993
This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.
Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system--and he just whaled on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven--not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to whale on is confusing.
We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill's so smart.
Bill is wise.
Bill is kind.
Bill is benevolent.
Bill, Be My Friend . . . Please!
Actually, nobody on our floor has ever been flamed by Bill personally. The episode was tinged with glamour and we were somewhat jealous. I tried to tell Michael this, but he was crushed.
Shortly before lunch he stood like a lump outside my office. His skin was pale like rising bread dough, and his Toppy's cut was dripping sweat, leaving little damp marks on the oyster-gray-with-plum highlights of the Microsoft carpeting. He handed me a printout of Bill's memo and then gallumphed into his office, where he's been burrowed ever since.
He won't answer his phone, respond to e-mail, or open his door. On his doorknob he placed a "Do Not Disturb" thingy stolen from the Boston Radisson during last year's Macworld Expo. Todd and I walked out onto the side lawn to try to peek in his window, but his venetian blinds were closed and a gardener with a leaf blower chased us away with a spray of grass clippings.
They mow the lawn every ten minutes at Microsoft. It looks like green Lego pads.
Finally, at about 2:30 a.m., Todd and I got concerned about Michael's not eating, so we drove to the 24-hour Safeway in Redmond. We went shopping for "flat" foods to slip underneath Michael's door.
The Safeway was completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people just like us--hair-trigger geeks in pursuit of just the right snack. Because of all the rich nerds living around here, Redmond and Bellevue are very "on-demand" neighborhoods. Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it's not immediately available. Nerds overfocus. I guess that's the problem. But it's precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing: one line at a time, one line in a strand of millions.
When we returned to Building Seven at 3:00 a.m., there were still a few people grinding away. Our group is scheduled to ship product (RTM: Release to Manufacturing) in just eleven days (Top Secret: We'll never make it).
Michael's office lights were on, but once again, when we knocked, he wouldn't answer his door. We heard his keyboard chatter, so we figured he was still alive. The situation really begged a discussion of Turing logic--could we have discerned that the entity behind the door was indeed even human? We slid Kraft singles, Premium Plus crackers, Pop-Tarts, grape leather, and Freezie-Pops in to him.
Todd asked me, "Do you think any of this violates geek dietary laws?"
Just then, Karla in the office across the hall screamed and then glared out at us from her doorway. Her eyes were all red and sore behind her round glasses. She said, "You guys are only encouraging him," like we were feeding a raccoon or something. I don't think Karla ever sleeps.
She harrumphed and slammed her door closed. Doors sure are important to nerds.
Anyway, by this point Todd and I were both really tired. We drove back to the house to crash, each in our separate cars, through the Campus grounds--22 buildings' worth of nerd-cosseting fun--cloistered by 100-foot-tall second growth timber, its streets quiet as the womb: the foundry of our culture's deepest dreams.
There was mist floating on the ground above the soccer fields outside the central buildings. I thought about the e-mail and Bill and all of that, and I had this weird feeling--of how the presence of Bill floats about the Campus, semi-visible, at all times, kind of like the dead grandfather in the Family Circus cartoons. Bill is a moral force, a spectral force, a force that shapes, a force that molds. A force with thick, thick glasses.
I am danielu@microsoft.com. If my life was a game of Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:
- Tandy products
- Trash TV of the late '70s and early '80s
- The history of Apple
- Career anxieties
- Tabloids
- Plant life of the Pacific Northwest
- Jell-O 1-2-3
I am a tester--a bug checker in Building Seven. I worked my way up the ladder from Product Support Services (PSS) where I spent six months in phone purgatory in 1991 helping little old ladies format their Christmas mailing lists on Microsoft Works.
Like most Microsoft employees, I consider myself too well adjusted to be working here, even though I am 26 and my universe consists of home, Microsoft, and Costco.
I am originally from Bellingham, up just near the border, but my parents live in Palo Alto now. I live in a group house with five other Microsoft employees: Todd, Susan, Bug Barbecue, Michael, and Abe.
We call ourselves "The Channel Three News Team."
I am single. I think partly this is because Microsoft is not conducive to relationships. Last year down at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference in San Jose, I met a girl who works not too far away, at Hewlett-Packard on Interstate 90, but it never went anywhere. Sometimes I'll sort of get something going, but then work takes over my life and I bail out of all my commitments and things fizzle.
Lately I've been unable to sleep. That's why I've begun writing this journal late at night, to try to see the patterns in my life. From this I hope to establish what my problem is--and then, hopefully, solve it. I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition. My life is lived day to day, one line of bug-free code at a time.
The house:
Growing up, I used to build split-level ranch-type homes out of Legos. This is pretty much the house I live in now, but its ambiance is anything but sterilized Lego-clean. It was built about twenty years ago, maybe before Microsoft was even in the dream stage and this part of Redmond had a lost, alpine ski-cabin feel.
Instead of a green plastic pad with little plastic nubblies, our house sits on a thickly-treed lot beside a park on a cul-de-sac at the top of a steep hill. It's only a seven-minute drive from Campus. There are two other Microsoft group houses just down the hill. Karla, actually, lives in the house three down from us across the street.
People end up living in group houses either by e-mail or by word of mouth. Living in a group house is a little bit like admitting you're deficient in the having-a-life department, but at work you spend your entire life crunching code and testing for bugs, and what else are you supposed to do? Work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep. I know a few Microsoft employees who try to fake having a life--many a Redmond garage contains a never-used kayak collecting dust. You ask these people what they do in their spare time and they say, "Uhhh--kayaking. That's right. I kayak in my spare time." You can tell they're faking it.
I don't even do many sports anymore and my relationship with my body has gone all weird. I used to play soccer three times a week and now I feel like a boss in charge of an underachiever. I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice.
The house is covered with dark cedar paneling. Out front there's a tiny patch of lawn covered in miniature yellow crop circles thanks to the dietary excesses of our neighbor's German shepherd, Mishka. Bug Barbecue keeps his weather experiments--funnels and litmus strips and so forth--nailed to the wall beside the front door. A flat of purple petunias long-expired from neglect--Susan's one attempt at prettification--depresses us every time we leave for work in the morning, resting as it does in the thin strip of soil between the driveway and Mishka's crop circles.
Abe, our in-house multimillionaire, used to have tinfoil all over his bedroom windows to keep out what few rays of sun penetrated the trees until we ragged on him so hard that he went out and bought a sheaf of black construction paper at the Pay N Pak and taped it up instead. It looked like a drifter lived here. Todd's only contribution to the house's outer appearance is a collection of car-washing toys sometimes visible beside the garage door. The only evidence of my being in the house is my 1977 AMC Hornet Sportabout hatchback parked out front when I'm home. It's bright orange, it's rusty, and damnit, it's ugly.Continues...
Excerpted from Microserfsby Coupland, Douglas Copyright © 2004 by Douglas Coupland. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
- Jell-O 1-2-3
- Plant life of the Pacific Northwest
- Tabloids
- Career anxieties
- The history of Apple
- Trash TV of the late '70s and early '80s
Detalles del producto
- Editorial : HarperCollins; Reprint edición (1 junio 1996)
- Idioma : Inglés
- ISBN-10 : 0060987049
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060987046
- Peso del producto : 295 g
- Dimensiones : 13.49 x 2.18 x 20.32 cm
- Opiniones de los clientes:
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I just adore this book, I bought a copy years ago and must have given it away or lost it in the attic, so bought another copy for my Kindle. If you grew up with the heady excitement of imported issues of Wired, and the impossible glamour of Palo Alto and the bright sunny optimism about IT that preceded social media, or indeed computers that normal people could use or afford, then this is nostalgia in a retro coke bottle.
The book is the journal of one of a bunch of Microsoft programmers who head off down to California to set up a start up developing a Lego like computer game. It is endlessly packed with products, cultural references, geeky conversations, extracts of stuff. It is also packed with insights that have by now become cliches, the blandness of Gap, the troubled relationship that programmers have with their bodies, the sheer weirdness of living. What really makes the book is the slightly autistic but naively upbeat and happy narrator. In tone it is like Naive. Super by Erlend Loe.
For me this is a bright piece of thoughtful escapism, but I can see that others might struggle with the endless IT references. I understand that Coupland did quite a lot of research for this, but for a bunch of Microsoft programmers, an awful lot of the references are to Apple products, rather than UNIX command lines and MS-DOS prompts. For a professionally published book there are also a lot of fairly obvious typos, and the tone wavers by the end, but all in all great fun.
For fans of this one, also worth reading J-Pod and the Gum Thief which offer more of the same sort of thing. For startup fans, then Boo Hoo: A Dot Com Story , and Dot.Bomb: The Inside Story of the First Dot.Com Crash: My Days and Night at an Internet Goliath are both a good read.
This is a must for those of us who deeply empathize with thematic elements in films such as Office Space or Trees Lounge. I actually was acquainted with a real housemates couple in Berkeley who could be characters in this novel, who in their "free time" romantically played computer games with each other and otherwise spent vast amounts of time behind a computer screen.
I remember the world before Atari and the internet. I recall anxious nuclear holocaust days prior to when "cyberspace" was a regular constituent in our mental vocabulary. Perhaps technology does in fact ennoble our human values and aspirations, or perhaps it is a means of convenient evasion from self-knowledge.
Coupland explores some of these concerns in this novel with real-life characters who could mirror those folks in tech cultures (Irvine, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and/or Portland)--a culture that is both oddly familiar yet cubicled in silence--nameless shadows who input code and ship products for our servile consumption.
At first it seems like Microserfs was written in 2011 with the hindsight of knowing where the events and technologies from 1993 to 1995 would lead in the future. But it was written in the time it describes. It's all the more impressive how prescient the absurd characters sometimes are.
The Kindle version was produced by OCR, feeding a physical copy of the book into a computer, leading to typos. This both distracts the reader and enhances the story, since the book is about just that kind of nonsense.
Whity, funny, yet emotionally honest and soul piercing at times, this book reveals the true nature of IT workers during the climb of the IT field. Written in 94 (i think), many of the lifestyles that Coupland wrote about then still hold true today. It showed me just how much of an IT slave I really am, but that freedom must first come from within, and that I am still a human being even though I work 60-70 hour work weeks. Is there a life outside of IT?
I think so! This book shows me the way and allows me to laugh at myself and the stupididty of my way of life. Thanks Doug...thanks for showing me there is more to life than computers.
kevin