I'm sure that some do, and most don't. Most kids 30 years ago didn't have similar thoughts either. Few people are meant to be programmers, engineers, etc. Were you not shunned as a nerd for having an interest in how computers worked?
Were you not shunned as a nerd for having an interest in how computers worked?
I remember those days. There was one table in the lunch room where the 10 or so kids who were into computers sat. I found out later talking to some other classmates that nobody else wanted to talk to us because they thought they weren't smart enough.
Were you not shunned as a nerd for having an interest in how computers worked?
I certainly wasn’t in the 10s. Usually people would come to me and my nerd buddies for PC building advice, smartphone advice, and of course the occasional “can you pirate this for me” request ;)
I think the early-00s was when it started to shift from something stigmatized to something that a person could be into and still be cool—or, at least, not regarded as automatically weird. By 2010 the shift was basically done, and The Great Techbro Wave was washing over the industry.
It's been super weird to watch the common idea of a computer person shift from someone with bad skin and shit posture in a pit-stained button-up and thick-rimmed glasses and who rarely sees the sun, to a trim, decent-looking person who's into rock climbing and wears lots of new, clean clothes from Patagonia. It was a really fast transition, in hindsight.
Back when I was in college in the mid-00s and TheFacebook was cool, because it was still limited to people with .edu email addresses from top-tier and Boston-area schools, I remember a group named "I'm a Computer Science Major and I Shower Regularly." I joined it even though I probably didn't shower regularly enough.
(For those who didn't have access to TheFacebook in those days, joining groups was part of how we expressed our political views, interests, sense of humor, etc. Groups had a name and a photo and a list of members and often served little other purpose.)
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I'm sure that some do, and most don't. Most kids 30 years ago didn't have similar thoughts either. Few people are meant to be programmers, engineers, etc. Were you not shunned as a nerd for having an interest in how computers worked?
I remember those days. There was one table in the lunch room where the 10 or so kids who were into computers sat. I found out later talking to some other classmates that nobody else wanted to talk to us because they thought they weren't smart enough.
Christ, that there were other kids with an interest in computers is amazing. I sat on my own lmao.
I had a friend to sit with at lunch and talk to excitedly about computers, PC gaming, robots, military hardware, etc. This was in the 90s.
you guys had friends?
I certainly wasn’t in the 10s. Usually people would come to me and my nerd buddies for PC building advice, smartphone advice, and of course the occasional “can you pirate this for me” request ;)
I think the early-00s was when it started to shift from something stigmatized to something that a person could be into and still be cool—or, at least, not regarded as automatically weird. By 2010 the shift was basically done, and The Great Techbro Wave was washing over the industry.
It's been super weird to watch the common idea of a computer person shift from someone with bad skin and shit posture in a pit-stained button-up and thick-rimmed glasses and who rarely sees the sun, to a trim, decent-looking person who's into rock climbing and wears lots of new, clean clothes from Patagonia. It was a really fast transition, in hindsight.
Back when I was in college in the mid-00s and TheFacebook was cool, because it was still limited to people with .edu email addresses from top-tier and Boston-area schools, I remember a group named "I'm a Computer Science Major and I Shower Regularly." I joined it even though I probably didn't shower regularly enough.
(For those who didn't have access to TheFacebook in those days, joining groups was part of how we expressed our political views, interests, sense of humor, etc. Groups had a name and a photo and a list of members and often served little other purpose.)
Tech had long since gone mainstream by that point though as the barrier of admission was lowered significantly, it was no longer the hobby of nerds.
I would still say the people in Linux club were _nerds_ but the platonic ideal of “nerd” had shifted from what it was in the 80s/90s.