Day 01 – Why do you consider yourself a geek?

I think therefore I am… a geek!

I look at the entry for Geek on Wikipedia to see what it has listed there.  This act is possibly a hint towards me being a geek all by itself but does reveal a number of definitions that I identify with.

Interests in technology and computing are apparently good indications of being a Geek.

My earliest recollections of being interested in computers was what was once called Standard 3 or 4, I don’t know what “Grade” they call it nowadays but I was about 9 or 10 years old – nearly 30 years ago.

Somehow I discovered computers and computer programming.  I do not remember how, but I began to read programming books.  Generally I think they tended to be aimed a teaching kids about computers and to program, but sometimes it would be quite serious textbooks.  I do not recall how much I understood, as most of it was pretty much way over my head at the time.

Also around this time, various stores in the neighbour mall had the latest computers on display.  The Commodore 64 being one of the most common on display with actually games running and available to try out.  I recall one game was some text based adventure game, and another was some white on black vector based shooter something like Asteroids.  I do not remember their names but I did spend a lot of time in those stores.

Then one day one store had an Acorn Electron computer on display but it wasn’t running any games, it only had its basic operating system available.  The best thing was I also had access to a programming book from the library on this very same machine and so I spent many an hour at this store copying in the programs I found in this book and seeing what they do – and I loved it.

It was a very sad day when the store eventually removed the computer from the bench they had it on display.

Why I did not grow up to found Microsoft or Google, I do not know but this was when I took my first steps towards Geekdom.