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

by vga256

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.

Genres: Computers

385 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2026

Reviews

[Dustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a walk back through childhood. Not my exact experiences, but told of the framework that I experienced my childhood in. Our young years had similar pressures and influences that categorically shaped a generation of humans. We didn’t all play the same games or love the same systems, but we all knew the ramifications of a 56k connection vs. a 23k connection.

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I laughed, I cringed, I reminisced. Of a time a little after mine with early computers, and in another country. I was never into games and gaming, but I can identify a lot with the content and the author