The 1980s and 1990s were a special time for being a computer and technology user. When my dad brought home our first fax machine, he invited his neighbour over just to brag about it. When I was ten years old, I regularly invited myself over to friends' houses just to play games like Leisure Suit Larry, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Donald Duck's Playground on their Amiga 1000, Commodore 64 and Atari 520ST.

Do you remember buying your first CD-ROM drive? Did you own a Sound Blaster and mess around with DR. SBAITSO for kicks? What was it like seeing digital video on a computer for the first time? What was the first dial-up connection you made - was it to a Bulletin Board System, or via SLIP/PPP? Who was the first person you ever chatted with over talkd or IRC?

If you recognize any of those exotic words, I wrote this book for you. In Mages & Modems I breathe life back into the forgotten worlds of 1980s and 1990s computing and gaming, from the perspective of a painfully awkward kid growing up in a world racing towards the digital age. This is a book of non-fiction stories that I lived through in the 80s and 90s in the small towns and cities of Western Canada.

The stories are funny, often heart-warming, and occasionally heart-breaking. They'll remind you of a time when your computer or video game system was your best friend in the world, and your morning bus ride was spent daydreaming about hanging out in the school's computer lab at lunch hour.

The paperback edition of Mages & Modems can be purchased on Amazon.

The DRM-free eBook (EPUB) edition of Mages & Modems is available on Itch.io.

You can read a writing sample from a few different chapters of the book here (PDF and EPUB).