Being a Tech Geek at the Start of the Computer Age was Awesome
The year was 1988 and I found myself looking for a new job. I had been exposed to computers in high school in the form of BASIC programming, but it didn’t make sense to me then. A few years down the road however, I realized that perhaps I should find a job that would introduce me to these new “personal computers” that had just started breaking into the consumer market. It was the dawn of the computer age, and little did I know that my introduction to those humming, beige, boxes of wonder would lead to a 25-year career in information technology.
Kings Quest and the Setting of the Hook
Having started a job at a prominent retailer (now defunct) that was known for electronics and its foray into the computer age, I had achieved my goal of getting a job where computers played a prominent role in my day. Although it was all still very new, and I had not learned a darn thing about them, it only took 5-minutes to get irrevocably hooked on these amazing new gadgets.
To this day I can still see it in my minds eye. At this time, most computers still ran off of floppy disks…mostly 5 1/4-inch, but the 3.5-inch disk had just started making its way to market. It wasn’t the marvel of word processing or spreadsheets that piqued my interest, rather it was the textual interaction of the very first Kings Quest game that blew my mind.
The idea of putting in that little piece of plastic shielding that circle of magnetic media and getting this magic on the screen was amazing to me. There was just something magical about it. To this day it feels like it flipped a hidden switch in me that caused me to suddenly care for nothing else in this world except learning about the computer age, and the devices that inhabited it.
Jumping With Both Feet Into The Computer Age
Within just a few years, I was entrenched and enamored in the growth and changes of these computers. I was obsessed with learning about hard drives, networking, laser printers, and modems. As someone who didn’t really enjoy those last few years of high school, I was consuming every piece of knowledge I could find…and loving it. MS-DOS may not have been a programming language, but it was a language all it’s own, and I mastered it.
In those pre-internet days you still learned from books and magazines. I remember Penn Jillette always had a great column at the back of PC/Computing Magazine. My education consisted of those resources, some classroom training from my employer, and hours and hours of hands-on exploration and trial and error.
There is an episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon’s “wonderful evening” is reinstalling all of his operating systems to create space for a Linux partition. Long before BBT was ever conceived, that was me…I lived that, and in those days it was pure, technical joy.
AOL CD’s, Windows 95, and the Power of the Geek
Thinking about Big Bang Theory for a moment…the show took nerds and technical geekdom from obscurity in 2007 to celebrated mainstream status by the time the shows’s run was over in 2019.
Back in the mid 90’s it was another matter. From the time America Online started mailing their AOL disks for their dial-up internet service in 1993 to well after the Y2K “crisis” tech geeks like myself had power. We relished the days of Windows 95. Bill Gates was our hero, long before he became a dangerous globalist, and were the kings of the computer age.
We spent hours upon hours upon hours building computers, scavenging parts from First Monday events, and just learning. We built, installed, tweaked, upgraded….then got a new mother board and started all over again. There was just so much to learn, it was exhilarating. It gave me a sense of power and worth, doing something that most people simply could not do!
Gaming in The Computer Age
Computer gaming held a special place in those days before Playstation and Xbox. Games like the very first Doom release combined the difficulty of creating enough available memory in that first 640k to get the game started, and, with the right syntax in the autoexec.bat and config.sys, tapping into that remaining 384 of upper ram…assuming you could afford a computer with a staggering 1024k of memory. Those of you that aren’t baby boomers might want to read that again…1024k…as in kilobytes…as in 1-megabyte (not gigabyte!) of ram.
Doom was astonishing because if you could network multiple PCs together, you could play simultaneously! It was amazing. Most people in those days didn’t have their own computer. If they used one at all it was at work. I had at least four, networked with RG-58 cable and network cards with BNC connectors. It really was the highlight of geekdom and the computer age. If you were able to achieve network play with games like Doom or Descent, you had reached the echelon of technology at the time.
The Dawn of The Internet
From the personal computer age we began to move into the internet age. Most of us started with dial-in bulletin boards, newsgroups, and FTP servers. We watched the rise of services like Prodigy, AOL, and then the eventual birth of the internet. We got to the cutting edge of technology and then stayed there.
Tech was changing fast and furious. In those days, you didn’t have to be a programmer to be a full-blown I.T. professional. Just keeping the average PC running was a career in of itself. We were constantly building, upgrading, reinstalling, tweaking, and networking. Man it was fun!
The Next Computer Age
As computers became more popular and more affordable, they began to offer attractive new features. When the dot matrix printer came out, people could not only print their type-written documents, but graphics too. Home greeting card packages and multi-colored print ribbons became popular. This added to an arsenal of useful tools these new personal computers offered.
For me, it was fuel for the fire…just one more technology to master. As PCs became more mainstream in the business world, suddenly there was a strong market for computer-savvy individuals. About this time I began a 25-year career in computers, starting first in support and then moving on to dozens of higher disciplines. At one point I had to make a career decision and I gambled on the fact that I was a baby boomer with no college education…but I knew computers.
Years later that decision paid off as I not only had the insatiable desire to learn, I had the means to do so and make it a great career. There was at one point, a full decade where there was nothing I could not do or could not figure out. I could do anything with computers. It was a great feeling, and extremely rewarding.
Separating Geeks from Professionals
Computer neophytes learned that was a big difference between “a guy who new about computers” and a real professional. More often than not, their friend, nephew, or brother in law that had dabbled in PC’s had no real experience if things didn’t go exactly as planned, and they rarely did.
I often moonlighted to do side jobs for people that were completely lost when it came to their computer. There was a time, several years really, where the gap between the information the computer and software manufacturers provided and what the customer actually knew or could do was as wide as the Grand Canyon. It was like assuming someone who had driven a car should be able to fix….an airplane, or a rocket.
These gap years separated the geeks from the professionals. Fortunately, I was the latter. As time went on, those same geeks began to wear the persona that culture ascribed them. The glasses-wearing, parents-basement-living lovers of Star Trek and bad social skills became the image we associated computer geeks with in that computer age.
Today’s Modern Geek
Today…it’s hard to tell if the true geek actually exists anymore. As a baby boomer with a high skill set, I enjoy a video game now and then, still know computers very well, and I continue to be well versed in various technologies, including mobile, cloud computing, programming, project management and A.I. In the past 25 years, I’ve done it all, and done it well.
Now however, an average person is expected to know how to use a computer…usually a laptop, at a high level. They are considered an idiot if they don’t know how to use their iPhone or Android phone proficiently. Televisions, automobiles, and homes all have tech in them that is the norm, rather than the exception.
The question is, are there still geeks in this new computer age, or is everyone a geek? Thanks for riding with me down the road of another one of my Boomer Memories.