“Embrace Your Geekness Day” – July 13

The folks at SingleHop approached me; they are running a blog series related to the fact that that yesterday was “Embrace Your Geekness Day.”

They suggested I should do a post about it. So here it is!

So here is why I’m a geek, and more geekier than most other folks who have posted a blog in honour this day.

• I was online in 1982, via a TRS-80 Radio Shack computer, with a 300 baud modem that had acoustic couplers. When you read your email, it came in character-by-character; one per second. Long email messages were not tolerated. This was 25 years before Twitter.
• I still have most of those emails, and every one since. We are talking about a 32 year old archive of email. I don’t make this stuff up.
• my first portable computer weighed 25 pounds. It was a Hyperion; built in Canada. It had two 128k floppy drives ; and was the first big tech failure of Canada (after that, there was Nortel, and then there was RIM). This was also 1982.
• I still have both those computers in my basement. They both still run. My kids are 19 and 21. When they were born, these computers were already ancient. Since then, we have gone to museums, and see the same computers. Outgeek that!
• when Napster came around in 1999, it already seemed old. Before Napster, there was USENET and alt.music. Look it up.
• geekness comes from being one of the first who hung around Bix. And Compuserve. And The Source. Oh, and who knew how to do email to someone with a .uucp address.

I’m not trying to suggest that I’m any sort of uber-geek.

I’m in awe of the fact that I got to see so much of the early architecture of what is now something so fundamental to the human race.

My message is this: take a snapshot for a moment of your geek-life. Remember it.

Because in 10 years, it won’t look *anything* like it does today. You will suddenly think that you lived in ancient times.