"I found it was shockingly backward and old-fashioned in terms of its production process," said Andersen, who co-founded Spy Magazine and is now a columnist for the New Yorker.
He oversaw New York Magazine's transition to computer technology -- "That was the first big way I became personally an evangelist for the advantages of high tech as a tool" -- and now he doesn't see technology just as a tool any more.
For Anderson, high tech has become a cultural tsunami, helping to create what he calls an "incredible flux" that defines the end of the 20th Century.
And that's the focus of his first novel, "Turn of the Century," for which he received a six-figure advance from Random House and which appeared last month to positive reviews.
It's all about Zeitgeist
"[Today is ] like the turn of the last century, where suddenly you had cars, movies, telephones, all these things that did indeed transform lives in a wholesale, deep way," Andersen said.
"You could make the argument that modernism in an artistic or cultural sense came out of that vortex ... and it seems reasonable to imagine that the same thing could happen now."
Andersen isn't the only one who's found in the digital revolution and the high-tech business a key to this Zeitgeist.
High tech isn't just grist for business books nowadays -- it's reached such a level in the public imagination that it is now the subject of movies, television and novels, with a slew of new arrivals coming this summer.
And while some of them are merely attempts to cash in on a fad, others are striving to turn the digital revolution into serious works of art.
High-tech blockbusters
"Pirates of Silicon Valley," a movie that premiered Sunday on TNT, dramatizes the rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, featuring "ER" star Noah Wyle as Jobs.
Meanwhile, movie director Robert Altman is reportedly collaborating with cartoonist Garry ("Doonesbury") Trudeau on a satirical soap opera about the startup culture, tentatively called "Killer App."
Po Bronson's "The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest," a recent Silicon Valley novel, is being turned into a movie by screenwriter Jon Favreau ("Swingers") and director Mick Jackson ("L.A. Story," "The Bodyguard," "Volcano").
A movie is also in the works based on John Markoff's book on hacker Kevin Mitnick, and writer Michael Lewis ("Liar's Poker") is reportedly working on both a screenplay and a nonfiction book set in the Valley.
'Bonfire of the Techno-Vanities'?
In the novelistic realm, recent works revolving around the high-tech biz include Pat Dillon's "The Last Best Thing"; "The Deal," a thriller based on author Joe Hutsko's experiences at Apple in the 1980s; "Silicon Follies," by Valley consultant Thomas Scoville, now being serialized on Salon.com.
"Cryptonomicon," a recent novel by science-fiction novelist Neal Stephenson, is set in the startup milieu, and this week novelist Bronson debuts his first nonfiction work, "Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley."
Even some of the more recent Valley books written by journalists are closer to celebrity-watching than "The Soul of a New Machine."
For example, Newsweek writer David Kaplan's new "The Silicon Boys" satirizes the super-rich of Woodside, Calif. -- a woodsy little enclave on the outskirts of the Valley with homes usually running $1 million and up -- with a collection of anecdotes one reader called a "Bonfire of the Techno-Vanities."
Coupland started it all
The tech-industry fiction subgenre, if that's what it is, is usually thought to have started in 1996 with Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs," which followed a group of Microsoft engineers who form an idealistic startup and eventually grind up against the rocks of reality.
Now Coupland had enough of a reputation to get away with such a book and such a topic, before most people had ever heard of Bill Gates.
But nowadays, no such literary reputation is needed. In fact, a writer is more likely to use high-tech subject matter just to break into the field.
Witness the tech-imbued first novels by former San Jose Mercury News writer Dillon ("The Last Best Thing"), UNIX geek Scoville ("Silicon Follies") and even New York media type Andersen ("End of the Century").
'The center of all our yearnings'
"This [tech industry] culture is at the center of all of our yearnings about money and status and revolution and transformation," said Jonathan Karp, senior editor at Random House, which published Bronson's "The First $20 Million."
"It's fertile material for fiction ... Silicon Valley is to the '90s what New York and Paris and Hollywood were to previous generations."
Silicon Valley might not yet have produced a "Bonfire of the Vanities," "The Sun Also Rises" or "Day of the Locust."
But that hasn't stopped several authors from making serious attempts at capturing what they call an inspiring social and cultural milieu.
'First 20 Million' a winner
Some say "The First $20 Million" is the most successful such excursion so far.
San Francisco-based Bronson began his career as a novelist with "Bombardiers," a satire of Wall Street bond traders, but he sees "First $20 Million," and now "Nudist on the Late Shift," as taking a different tack.
He views his latest works as following more in the nonfiction tradition of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," a portrait of Haight-Ashbury in the '60s, or the socially conscious journalism of Upton Sinclair.
"I'm not interested so much in the technology as in the social transformation that's going on," Bronson said. "It's interesting to watch class get broken down, the way we think about race get broken down, in this success-oriented environment. What could be a better story than that?"
Bronson had intended to move on to other material after "First $20 Million," but felt the subject still needed exploring. And so, while many reporters are turning to fiction, Bronson put his reporting skills to work.
A search for meaning
His thesis: Far from a bubble-economy built on mass hysteria, the Internet boom is the result of a fundamental shift in the nature of work, and even in the way people live their lives.
"It seems for young people ... finding the meaning of work is one of the ultimate dramas of what's going on," Bronson said. "Every generation to come before us has had to make a choice in life between wild adventures and a steady career.
"And here that's been hoodwinked -- in six months you can go through all kinds of craziness, and yet you've got a career going."
Silicon Valley nonbeliever
"Silicon Follies" author Scoville, though, isn't as taken with this sunny view of Silicon Valley life.
Fifteen years of working there have left him with a distrust of amazing techno-financial booms that seem likely to go on forever.
Scoville, a liberal arts graduate, fell into the Valley's artificial-intelligence scene in the early '80s, through a self-described "idiot/savant" ability to understand computers.
At that time, he said, there seemed to be as much hype around AI as there is today around e-commerce.
"[But] by 1988, the entire AI industry had cratered, tanked and vanished," he said.
No boosterism here
"I've already been through one cycle of boom and bust, and as a consultant, I've seen a couple more cycles," Scoville continued. "So I have a keen idea of what the bottom of this looks like, and I have a hard time being a shameless high-tech booster."
Instead, he's interested in showing that "there's another side to this" -- a position he admits is a bit cranky.
If his underlying theme is disillusionment -- having watched the Valley's themes of the day move from the expansion of human potential to the expansion of shopping opportunities -- Scoville's primary goal as a writer is to entertain.
The model for "Silicon Follies" is another comic-adventure serial set in the Bay Area: Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City," set in '70s San Francisco.
A brave new techno world?
But so far, even those who see a kind of renaissance emerging from the workstations and boardrooms of the digital industry allow that the dynamism hasn't yet formed the kernel of any really inspiring art or entertainment.
"Silicon Valley ... is not an architectural center, it's not an art center," said Scott Rosenberg, senior editor at Salon.com. "It really is very obsessively focused on its product, technology.
"And that means that, so far at least, it's not like Florence in the Renaissance or something. There's not a whole lot outside of technology that Silicon Valley is creating."
Or maybe it's just too early for the repercussions to be felt at the cultural level.
The most we can do for now, Andersen suggested, is to watch the future come into shape -- "the spectacle of these two worlds, one dying, one being born" -- without yet knowing what it means.
"We're still too much in the center of this," he said.
