It first appeared in short story form[1] as the cover article for the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine and was subsequently expanded to full novel length.

[2] Set in the early 1990s, it captures the state of the technology industry before Windows 95, and anticipates the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

The novel is presented in the form of diary entries maintained on a PowerBook by the narrator, Daniel.

[3] The plot of the novel has two distinct movements: the events at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and the move to Silicon Valley and the "Oop!"

Life at the campus feels like a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the lord, and the employees the serfs.

The second movement of the novel begins when the characters are offered jobs in Silicon Valley working on a project for Michael, who has by then left Redmond.

The characters' lives change drastically once they leave the limited sphere of the Microsoft campus and enter the world of "One-Point-Oh".

is a Lego-like design program, allowing dynamic creation of many objects, bearing a resemblance to 2009's Minecraft (Coupland appears on the rear cover of the novel's hardcover editions photographed in Denmark's Legoland Billund, holding a Lego 777.).

That's like a billion person-hours a day spent, and yet none of the stories we tell, or the books we write, take place in an office.

These people are so locked into the world, by default some sort of transcendence is located elsewhere, and obviously machines become the totem they imbue with sacred properties, wishes, hopes, goals, desires, dreams.

"[10] The book takes place first at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington (near Seattle) and then Silicon Valley (near San Francisco).

When Microserfs first came out, most people thought it was a tightly focused anthropological look at a tiny group of historically transient information workers in the American Pacific Northwest.

Tinned Peaches Yttrium San Fran"This message is an adapted version of the Rifleman's Creed.