Mages & Modems: A Childhood Well-Wasted in the Golden Age of Personal Computers, Games, and Internet Piracy

Did you grow up with bulletin board systems and UNIX shell accounts? Or hang around with other kids just because they had a Sega Master System or Nintendo Entertainment System? How many hours of your life were spent installing games from floppy disk, like Leisure Suit Larry or Monkey Island or Ultima? Did you skip entire days of work or school because you were playing Ultima Online with thousands of other strangers using dial-up modems?

If any of those names spark a memory, Mages & Modems will bring you back to a time when the Internet was delivered over telephone lines and video games were distributed on floppy disks and cartridges. Each chapter is a short personal history of 1980s and 1990s technology as remembered by an awkward kid growing up in a world racing towards the digital age.

If you're looking for laughs at my expense, want some heartwarming memories of retrocomputing and gaming, or just want to know what it was really like to grow up with old computers and consoles and the early Internet, this is the book for you.

Each byte-sized chapter is short enough to read through while you're waiting for your compiler to finish building, or for the next stop on the metro & bus. 

From the rear cover:

ACME Detective Agency

Dear Detective #0294,

As discussed, I have enclosed a hardcopy of VGA256's journals discussed at the departmental briefing. The journal entries are chronological, and document the suspect's computing and gaming activities from the early 1980s to late 1990s - his childhood and adolescent years.

Each vignette is an introspection into the suspect's self-described obsessions, including but not limited to:

* IBM PC, Amiga, Apple ][, Macintosh, Tandy 

* MS-DOS, MacOS, Windows 3.1 & 95, UNIX 

* NES, GameBoy, Sega Genesis, TI-85 

* Modems, BBSes, CompuServe, Prodigy, ISPs 

* Warez, FTP, Usenet, IRC, Shell Accounts 

* Origin Systems, LucasArts, and Sierra On-Line

... and so on. The stories are a treasure trove of immoral and illicit activities that made him the dysfunctional adult he is now. I hope these will be of value in building your dossier on this delinquent.  

I expect a report on my desk by Friday.

Deputy Chief Conover

Brat & Punk Division

This eBook edition is identical to the print edition in terms of content, and all proceeds go directly to the author instead of a third party publisher. If you'd like the print edition instead, it is available for purchase on Amazon.

Specifications

• 385 pages (based on 5.25" x 8" paperback edition)
• 110,000 words
• Estimated 8 hours average total reading time
• ISBN-10: 1069988515
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0699885-1-5