wow, that's kind of crazy cool. 1) the help was offered at all. 2) to put you in touch with others (lots of personal cred at risk there) 3) they helped you out in kind 4) you were only 12.
things sure were different in the 90s.
things sure were different in the 90s.
You can't imagine what scarcity of nerds there was back then. These days, every city has hundreds or thousands of programmers. But in the 90s -- for any area of computer interest -- there were only a few hundred of you around the world. It was wonderful to meet someone with the same interests.
Being interested in programming/hardware/security AUTOMATICALLY made you a member of a small club. Most of the other members were glad to help you. And there wasn't a surplus of people all trying to stand out and be noticed on social media. (In fact, because you were into computers for the love of them, you probably weren't even thinking along the lines of "I must get noticed by $celeb so I can ask them for a job". The odious phrase "personal brand" had not been coined yet, and the concept was foreign to most in our computer nerd world.)
It lasted until around 2008 or 2010, I reckon -- about the point at which "go into computers, it has good money", the success of YC, and the rapid growth of FAANGs really made nerds ubiquitous. Then Marvel/Disney turned our niche interests into the mainstream, and we became culturally adrift. We were in sitcoms (Silicon Valley, even Big Bang Theory to a great extent) and fully mainstreamed. At that point, you could ask someone for something but you were just one of an ocean of unremarkable others.
That's how things were different in the 90s and (as a white English-speaking het guy who had Internet access) gosh I miss those times.
I really dislike the modern tech industry. I think that money ruined everything. Vast majority of my coworkers over the last decade or so are the type that used to train to be doctors, lawyers and other lucrative careers, with no real passion in computers or tech. It's all about money.
I do dream about changing careers. I know at least one other thing I'd love to do but it would pay a fraction of what I can make now and simply isn't feasible.
And there was vast literature. Petzolds programming windows first edition is from 1988 and second from 1990. While the first might have been a niche publication usually there is only a second edition if there is substantial interest. (number of prints would be nice to know).
But even given the prevalence of Windows development, it was still rare to encounter another programmer socially unless you lived in the occasional city where they were common. My point is that nerds finding nerds was a much rarer thing back then.
I co-wrote a noughts and crosses program to run on a Busicom in 1973; and continued programming at university ('74-'77).
See, inter alia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesil, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busicom.
You can also see it in the Seattle sketch comedy "Almost Live" series, whenever they did a bit on Microsoft.
Myself, I learned to avoid mention of my profession when meeting women.
In some ways I think that was the revenge of the "nerd". Although in another way most of these new "nerd" never experience the 80s, 90s and 00s. And they are very different nerds to those in that era. Too much hype, too little engineering.
It did not make nerds ubiquitous. It made nerd wannabes ubiquitous. The ppl with OG nerd-like qualities are actually frowned upon in the industry now. Somehow a SWE needs to be a "well rounded" individual. Technical skills don't matter much anymore.
Way back in the 90's I reached a conclusion that a programmer or sysadmin or hardware guy is now just the new auto mechanic.
'98 or so I was shopping for replacement software for my uncles business (y2k prep) and we went to this firms office, and basically everyone in the office, the owner, all the developers, the sales guy, the guy who would come out to install the hardware... every one of them could have been in their high school football team 10 years earlier. They were doing this kind of job because there was money in it full stop. They took us out to dinner and the conversation only comfirmed that snap perception. You could substitute "propane and propane products" in place of software and IT hardware without changing a thing about any of them.
Perversely today I probably wouldn't use the same comparison because auto mechanic is probably more nerdly and interesing persuit today than it used to be.
I think what I mean to say it's now a trade.
You might be a nerd in that trade just like you might be a nerd welder, but it's no longer required. You don't even have to be a wannabe nerd although many are.
Countless people in those jobs with no special love of it, and no fundamental curiosity.
School counselors told them it was going to be in demand, so they did that.
I think it's both better and worse today since then.
Obviously the sheer mass of IT work needed today, and the sheer mass population of people needed to do it, means that there are a many many people doing IT work that aten't good at it and don't love it.
Obviously today it's no longer special to to work with computers.
And there is also the ever present dislike for intellectuals in general that hurts nerds even at the same time when there is some nerd cache from making money. (actually I bet the nerds don't even make the real money any more. they get harnessed by the business types)
But I think it's also true there are more actual nerds today and they are more accepted than in the past. Still outnumbered by wannabes and everyone else, and the real nerds still not really liked or taken seriously by most, but more and better than 20 years ago.
They still want to know enough to not get fired, but that’s where it ends.
I kind of feel it pulls the average down though, and it makes my work environment less ideal.
Tech companies have lost that charm now. I have worked at companies where doin a good job does not even matter anymore. Its all about "projection" and "perception"
But that particular blog post aside, you do make a good point. The 'nerd' in my head (and / or the one that I am) doesn't score too well on EQ and social skills, or to be even more blunt, is often on the autism spectrum and has to mask to match those expectations from the more neurotypical folk. But that said, I think one has to mask even with other neurodiverse people, because else they will just rub each other the wrong way.
Lots of athletic folks.
I think it’s because Ivy League and Wall Street folks have been invading (or taken as captives), and the Ivy League/Wall Street aesthetic is not exactly geeky.
The guy who got me into tech and computers was a former green beret. Most athletic guy I’ve ever known, and a genius with tech.
I don’t think he was a nerd, but this is really subjective.
Or the Neil Degrasse Tyson story of how he met Carl Sagan.
It was a brilliant moment in time. I was able to routinely chat with an astonishing number of excellent and famous minds when I was young and impressionable in a way that would never happen today. I feel very fortunate to have lived that, it had an enormous impact on my life I think. And it was safe for the people I corresponded with to be accessible back then.
While I'm mostly joking about that last part, Lorinda did always mention that my childishness was expressed in curiosity rather than blatant immaturity. She said that was the key to being able to exist in these professional spaces without drawing undue attention to myself. It also helped that I steeled myself by participating in Usenet, where often times it seemed people were competing to be the most toxic person in the collective.
I have a hunch you’d enjoy it :)
In that environment, a lot of adults were willing to give technically minded kids at least some amount of their time because the only reason most of us (kids, at the time) were asking questions was because we just wanted to understand how all this stuff worked for fun rather than working on a get rich quick scheme. I also suspect the adults found this enthusiasm more interesting than the general disdain they probably experienced at the office.
[1] As in, put in some time and develop an area of expertise that someone valued... then you could start making money. Most college grads were viewed as fairly useless for their first few years out of school and their salaries reflected that.
I remember that if you said you mentioned computers people in general would just parrot that back to you in this "nerd" voice as if it was a joke.
It was rare to even read about what was happening in the world of computers in a mainstream newspaper.
To me, a kid at the time, I felt like I was seeing the gateway to a new kind future unrolling but there was just no way to discuss that with "normal" people at the time.
I guess any adult working in that industry would be keen to share that with anyone interested regardless of age because it was all changing so fast and was so damn exciting.
And, welp, here we are.
But I'm reasonably sure that if today I bumped into some random kid that was obsessed with anything 'geeky' that makes me fondly remember when I was that age, I'd jump on the opportunity. Wouldn't we all?
Nowadays kids can befriend celebs on Twitter. It's easier, not harder.
It smells like a natural progression from the “old” internet of newsgroups and email.
Is friending a celebrity on Twitter the same as getting an email or phone call from Ken Thompson on how to fix your old Bell hardware just because Lorinda Cherry put him up to it? No, of course not. But that connection could happen over Twitter.