Growing Up Geek

I grew up a geek.... just totally different then chrildren of the past 20 or so years. See my geekdom was more limited you might say then today. My opportunities were sparse to show off my great store of knowledge in all things technology. I guess I was a delayed start geek.

Me about age 9

I'll explain. Today's young adults grew up (growing up) in the world of mbile phones, maybe shmart phones, computers, notebooks, tablets, TV on phones, computers and even TVs. Young geeks always have thought that everyone even their parents or grandparents alway the same "toys" and opportunities they had. It was (is) just part of their world natually.

Contrast that to me, who while growing up more than a few years ago. I had:

• No color TVs... black and white sets were the standard
• No mobile phones, in fact only a "private" phone from AT&T. Note that there really were shared phone lines between your neighbors and your home.
• No computers of course
• Music from either AM radio or vinyl records 33s and 45s thats it
• Radios were desktop and the new transistor portable radios.. for you know... when you were at the beach.
• Car electronics were the AM radio, horn and that is about it.

However that did not stop me from being the resident geek for my family and neighbors. Just a different set of tools then today offers. I did I achieve my geekdom then. I started to take apart radios, TVs and just about anything that electroncis in so I could see how they work. Of course sometimes after my investigations they didn't work again but mostly they did. I tricked out radios to add external speakers, added an extra phone to our house phone line (very ilegal at the time), learned how to change the tubes in our TVs without having to pull of them out to find the one that was bad.

Time marched on and soon I was a young adult working for my first company in a computer area. This is at a time when only 250,000 or so people worked in the computer industry. So my delayed geekness on computers was with a room size IBM 360 computer system. While young I knew more then my older associates about how it ran, why it ran, doing things they didn't know how to do. It was pretty cool stuff writing assemble language and other low level languages.

My beloved Datapoint

Then I had the real geek fun of using one the very first small computers the Datapoint 2200 in 1970 and just making it hum. My Datapoint joy was powered by an Intel 8008 chip, with a real screen of 12 rows of 80 characters and for storage a set of two cassette decks.

Do I miss not having grown up with the large array of geek toys of today? Not at all. I geeked out on the items that were available to me. Same feelings just different machaines.