When I was young, “geek” was not cool. Neither was “nerd.” Working on cars was cool as was logging and shooting Bambi’s uncles with high-powered rifles, at least where I came. On the other hand, every little town had a Radio Shack where you could buy tubes, transistors, ICs and other assorted electronic components. You don’t see that so much anymore. Grocery stores sold publications like Byte Magazine, 101 Electronics Projects and Radio Electronics. Those magazines were about building things. People who read and wrote those and others like them created an industry in their garages, basements and bedrooms. They started a new Industrial Revolution.
Still, back then, tech folks were more likely thought of as mad monks and strange people like Eddie Deezen as “Mr. Potato Head” (Malvin) in the 1983 movie War Games. You didn’t want to be one. I like to think that attitudes have changed over the years, and I think the signs are there.
The FIRST Lego league with its robotics tournaments has created a legitimate “sports like” atmosphere for geek-types in school. 50,000 plus Arduinos being sold shows that the electronics hobbyist world is moving again like it did in the 80s. The maker and bender communities illustrated by Hackaday, Makezine and supported by companies like Adafruit and SparkFun show that creating with chips is as alive as it was in the late 70’s and 80’s. TV shows like Mythbusters, Jimmy Neutron and Prototype This have glorified the geek.
And why do we care? Because the more engineers we build out of the masses, the better we can design and build our economy. The more mainstream and acceptably technology is, the more educators will work to encourage and foster the environment and attitudes that allowed Apple, Dell, Google and SparkFun to thrive. We need that. We need robotics competitions to be as socially acceptable as football games.
Duane Benson
The rooms were so much colder then