wow, that's kind of crazy cool. 1) the help was offered at all. 2) to put you in touch with others (lots of personal cred at risk there) 3) they helped you out in kind 4) you were only 12.

things sure were different in the 90s.

Things were different. I had a similar experience with Michael Hart from Project Gutenberg. I stayed in his house! He was ridiculously warm and welcoming.

You can't imagine what scarcity of nerds there was back then. These days, every city has hundreds or thousands of programmers. But in the 90s -- for any area of computer interest -- there were only a few hundred of you around the world. It was wonderful to meet someone with the same interests.

Being interested in programming/hardware/security AUTOMATICALLY made you a member of a small club. Most of the other members were glad to help you. And there wasn't a surplus of people all trying to stand out and be noticed on social media. (In fact, because you were into computers for the love of them, you probably weren't even thinking along the lines of "I must get noticed by $celeb so I can ask them for a job". The odious phrase "personal brand" had not been coined yet, and the concept was foreign to most in our computer nerd world.)

It lasted until around 2008 or 2010, I reckon -- about the point at which "go into computers, it has good money", the success of YC, and the rapid growth of FAANGs really made nerds ubiquitous. Then Marvel/Disney turned our niche interests into the mainstream, and we became culturally adrift. We were in sitcoms (Silicon Valley, even Big Bang Theory to a great extent) and fully mainstreamed. At that point, you could ask someone for something but you were just one of an ocean of unremarkable others.

That's how things were different in the 90s and (as a white English-speaking het guy who had Internet access) gosh I miss those times.

I can definitely relate with this. Grew up hacking IBM PCs in the 90s, got heavily involved in BBSs as a young kid, even wrote letters to random software developers (remember scorched earth?).

I really dislike the modern tech industry. I think that money ruined everything. Vast majority of my coworkers over the last decade or so are the type that used to train to be doctors, lawyers and other lucrative careers, with no real passion in computers or tech. It's all about money.

I do dream about changing careers. I know at least one other thing I'd love to do but it would pay a fraction of what I can make now and simply isn't feasible.

I think a few hundred programmers in the 90s is underestimating the numbers by a factor of at least 1000 and (probably much much) more. Of course such numbers are difficult to estimate, but here some pointers: It was introduced in school in several countries in the early 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science_education

And there was vast literature. Petzolds programming windows first edition is from 1988 and second from 1990. While the first might have been a niche publication usually there is only a second edition if there is substantial interest. (number of prints would be nice to know).

You're right. I said "for any interest" but obviously, like all things attention there's a power law distribution. Many Windows programmers, or anything else that had massive interest. But if you were a Unix kernel nerd, there weren't many Unix kernel nerds around. If you were a Perl programmer, there weren't that many Perl programmers.

But even given the prevalence of Windows development, it was still rare to encounter another programmer socially unless you lived in the occasional city where they were common. My point is that nerds finding nerds was a much rarer thing back then.

I'm not sure the OP was making this claim exactly -- I think they just meant for any particular interest (like running Plan 9 on some old hardware) there were probably only a few hundred people around who shared that particular interest.

Could be. But any particular interest is def not true (windows programming), so more like some niche interest. But this is the definition of niche interest, isnt it.

I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met that did windows programming, both before or after 2005.

Computer programming was a nationally available subject in secondary schools in the UK in the mid '70s.

I co-wrote a noughts and crosses program to run on a Busicom in 1973; and continued programming at university ('74-'77).

See, inter alia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesil, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busicom.

Computer nerds suddenly became attractive when Bill Gates made his first $billion. Before that we were pariahs <g>.

I had an old IBM XT clone sitting in my bedroom at the age of 12-13. I brought a friend over once and he called me a nerd. Not the "nerd" of today. Back then it stung. He said it with a bit of disgust, as if he learned some dark secret I had been harboring. I even loaded up Catacomb 3-D (a very early id Software precursor to Wolfenstein 3D) to prove I can be cool too. It didn't really work.

I was and still am a computer nerd and I was never a pariah. I'm sure some nerds out there felt like it. But, anecdotally, that was not my experience.

Consider movies at the time that had computer people in it. They were always portrayed as bumbling, inept people with bad greasy haircuts, odd clothing, pimples, and tape holding their glasses together. The hero would always berate them with "speak English, please".

You can also see it in the Seattle sketch comedy "Almost Live" series, whenever they did a bit on Microsoft.

Myself, I learned to avoid mention of my profession when meeting women.

Even at Caltech at the time, being a computer nerd was not popular. Popular was physics (possibly because Feynman was there at the time). Astronomy was popular, too. Back then, however, nobody had any inkling of how much money could be made from computers.

Yes. I am not sure if Bill Gate made the difference in the public image of nerd. May be in the State. Even the Google era in 00s didn't change much. ( May be very briefly during Dot Com bubble ) My first realisation of Tech really going into Mass Market was the Smartphone era in 2010. When you over heard conversion from everyday life people having lunch talking about ISO ( it should be iOS, but they got it wrong ). And Apple, or iPhone became a yearly event that all mainstream media publish. By around 2012 App Developers became "cool".

In some ways I think that was the revenge of the "nerd". Although in another way most of these new "nerd" never experience the 80s, 90s and 00s. And they are very different nerds to those in that era. Too much hype, too little engineering.

>>> really made nerds ubiquitous

It did not make nerds ubiquitous. It made nerd wannabes ubiquitous. The ppl with OG nerd-like qualities are actually frowned upon in the industry now. Somehow a SWE needs to be a "well rounded" individual. Technical skills don't matter much anymore.

This.

Way back in the 90's I reached a conclusion that a programmer or sysadmin or hardware guy is now just the new auto mechanic.

'98 or so I was shopping for replacement software for my uncles business (y2k prep) and we went to this firms office, and basically everyone in the office, the owner, all the developers, the sales guy, the guy who would come out to install the hardware... every one of them could have been in their high school football team 10 years earlier. They were doing this kind of job because there was money in it full stop. They took us out to dinner and the conversation only comfirmed that snap perception. You could substitute "propane and propane products" in place of software and IT hardware without changing a thing about any of them.

Perversely today I probably wouldn't use the same comparison because auto mechanic is probably more nerdly and interesing persuit today than it used to be.

I think what I mean to say it's now a trade.

You might be a nerd in that trade just like you might be a nerd welder, but it's no longer required. You don't even have to be a wannabe nerd although many are.

Countless people in those jobs with no special love of it, and no fundamental curiosity.

School counselors told them it was going to be in demand, so they did that.

I think it's both better and worse today since then.

Obviously the sheer mass of IT work needed today, and the sheer mass population of people needed to do it, means that there are a many many people doing IT work that aten't good at it and don't love it.

Obviously today it's no longer special to to work with computers.

And there is also the ever present dislike for intellectuals in general that hurts nerds even at the same time when there is some nerd cache from making money. (actually I bet the nerds don't even make the real money any more. they get harnessed by the business types)

But I think it's also true there are more actual nerds today and they are more accepted than in the past. Still outnumbered by wannabes and everyone else, and the real nerds still not really liked or taken seriously by most, but more and better than 20 years ago.

What I dislike now is that previously I could assume that anyone with the same interest had some form of passion for the craft, but now they’re swallowed up in a sea of people that are there -like you said- just for the money.

They still want to know enough to not get fired, but that’s where it ends.

I kind of feel it pulls the average down though, and it makes my work environment less ideal.

There will always be a place for those of us who like tinkering with software and/or computer hardware, the nerds. We like using the CLI or Vim or Emacs. We go deep on compilers and PLT. But I personally welcome those who aren't nerds in the same way. I like showing them how to be more efficient in their work, build more robust/reliable software, and helping them understand the job they are doing better. Maybe, I'm nerding out about mentorship but I find it rewarding to help the non-nerd become just a little more nerdy in their career. It's an opportunity not a problem.

Niche and Nerdery is fractal, I find. I also find sharing my findings from exploring random niche corners of obscure topics to be rewarding.

I agree, the Tech field has exploded and lotsa people are into it which is a good thing. But when anything goes "mainstream" it loses its charm, it loses the X-Factor which made it special.

Tech companies have lost that charm now. I have worked at companies where doin a good job does not even matter anymore. Its all about "projection" and "perception"

I've heard it described as "social gentrification", but that particular article tried to defend offensive behaviour (think 4chan) as a personality trait or a way to keep 'normies' at bay. I don't think that's the way to go either, because the very same type that defends their offensive and antagonistic behaviour will suffer from loneliness as well. The venn diagram overlaps a lot there.

But that particular blog post aside, you do make a good point. The 'nerd' in my head (and / or the one that I am) doesn't score too well on EQ and social skills, or to be even more blunt, is often on the autism spectrum and has to mask to match those expectations from the more neurotypical folk. But that said, I think one has to mask even with other neurodiverse people, because else they will just rub each other the wrong way.

Last time I was in Silicon Valley, I was shocked at how the nerd aesthetic had gone away.

Lots of athletic folks.

I think it’s because Ivy League and Wall Street folks have been invading (or taken as captives), and the Ivy League/Wall Street aesthetic is not exactly geeky.

Nerds can be athletic. Loving tech doesn't mean you can't also take care of your body.

I’m struggling to find the right word for “type of person” … words like “nerds” and “jocks” can be limiting, since plenty of people are both.

The guy who got me into tech and computers was a former green beret. Most athletic guy I’ve ever known, and a genius with tech.

I don’t think he was a nerd, but this is really subjective.

Makes you think how not ridiculous the scene from War Games where they get stuck on an island and the guy just lets them stay in his house when they miss the ferry. Makes for convenient story telling that in today's standards just seems like would be a 'awhellznaw' kind of response.

Or the Neil Degrasse Tyson story of how he met Carl Sagan.

That easily happens also today in less densely populated areas.

The 90s were like that. Tech was a much smaller community and you could cold email just about anyone with a decent probability of a response because being on the Internet was a highly selective filter in its own right. In its own way, it was a golden age in terms of accessibility to really smart people.

It was a brilliant moment in time. I was able to routinely chat with an astonishing number of excellent and famous minds when I was young and impressionable in a way that would never happen today. I feel very fortunate to have lived that, it had an enormous impact on my life I think. And it was safe for the people I corresponded with to be accessible back then.

I agree. I think she was so chuffed that someone so young was interested in her work that she was willing to break social norms. I also think it definitely helped that I didn't mention a big reason I chose to pursue Plan 9 was that Glenda was such a cool mascot.

While I'm mostly joking about that last part, Lorinda did always mention that my childishness was expressed in curiosity rather than blatant immaturity. She said that was the key to being able to exist in these professional spaces without drawing undue attention to myself. It also helped that I steeled myself by participating in Usenet, where often times it seemed people were competing to be the most toxic person in the collective.

The closest to that for me was being a just out of high school employee at an interesting post production facility that had some talented people in the engineering staff. I was a kid in a candy store, but all electronics and video/film based stuff. The engineers were probably taken off guard by my incessant questions of why/how/huh until they eventually realized that I wan't being a pest but actually learning what they were sharing. At some point, the questions were advanced enough they wanted me to switch departments. Definitely the best OJT situation I've ever been in, but that was 30 years ago now. damn.

Have you ever read “I Am A Strange Loop”? You may enjoy Chapter 5, “On Video Feedback” if I recall correctly.

I have a hunch you’d enjoy it :)

It was different prior to the mid-90's and the 80's (despite much more primitive tech) were even more fun. Two things happened around the same time: Bill Gates became the worlds richest man (and a household name) and a bunch of college dropouts started becoming overnight multi-millionaires (at least) with the dot com explosion which was well publicized. Prior to that, sure there was good money to be made in some areas of tech[1], but many were driven by interest rather than a career path and most non-tech people just regarded computers as those things they didn't understand. Most business people regarded computers as fancy calculators that did the accounting and it was hella-hard to even get them to learn about spreadsheets. So geeks were pretty much left alone and programming wasn't seen as the mail room job on the path to getting rich it is today.

In that environment, a lot of adults were willing to give technically minded kids at least some amount of their time because the only reason most of us (kids, at the time) were asking questions was because we just wanted to understand how all this stuff worked for fun rather than working on a get rich quick scheme. I also suspect the adults found this enthusiasm more interesting than the general disdain they probably experienced at the office.

[1] As in, put in some time and develop an area of expertise that someone valued... then you could start making money. Most college grads were viewed as fairly useless for their first few years out of school and their salaries reflected that.

Yeah there was this odd change over. I'm not exactly sure when but probably around the dotcom boom.

I remember that if you said you mentioned computers people in general would just parrot that back to you in this "nerd" voice as if it was a joke.

It was rare to even read about what was happening in the world of computers in a mainstream newspaper.

To me, a kid at the time, I felt like I was seeing the gateway to a new kind future unrolling but there was just no way to discuss that with "normal" people at the time.

I guess any adult working in that industry would be keen to share that with anyone interested regardless of age because it was all changing so fast and was so damn exciting.

I don't know - it also went away with the bust. I picked CS as my major shortly after the bust and everyone advised me against it. Between the bust and outsourcing I was told I would be making minimum wage.

And, welp, here we are.

You're actually reinforcing my point about the change in the industry. Many of the people who came up in tech prior to the mid-90's didn't care of the industry was in boom or bust mode: they just wanted to work in/with tech. I completely understand those who got into it because they saw it purely through a financial lens, but that's a different subset of people in tech.

Yes and no. Things were different, for sure. Hell end 80's I hung around a random polytechnic school at age 14, where I played to my hearts content with their professional CAD stations and programed their robotic arm. I had no reason being there, where it not that we visited once because my mom knew someone there, and the IT lab guy took a liking to me.

But I'm reasonably sure that if today I bumped into some random kid that was obsessed with anything 'geeky' that makes me fondly remember when I was that age, I'd jump on the opportunity. Wouldn't we all?

Is it so different today? Kids are still curious and reliant on their elders to both provide and mentor. It’s our turn to be the Lorinda (or Ken Thompson) to some other curious kid.

Indeed. These days you're lucky if you can get a project maintainer to respond to a PR within a few years.

Things were different. Michel Gien (co-founder and CEO of Chorus) would couch surf at my place when he was in Austin on business.

I don't think a colleague and friend would disrespect someone for making an introduction to a kid, even if the kid turned out less cool than thread OP.

Nowadays kids can befriend celebs on Twitter. It's easier, not harder.

Good grief. There's a huge difference in following someone on Twitter vs a personal email account. You think someone you meet that knows $famousCelebrity is just going to give you their email account? Really?

The favorable reading is that friending a celebrity on Twitter is a historically low effort way to make contact, even if it is correspondingly low value. Everyone is “close”. This means there are more opportunities for connection.

It smells like a natural progression from the “old” internet of newsgroups and email.

Is friending a celebrity on Twitter the same as getting an email or phone call from Ken Thompson on how to fix your old Bell hardware just because Lorinda Cherry put him up to it? No, of course not. But that connection could happen over Twitter.

> Lorinda helped me massively with my attempts to bring back online some hardware that had escaped early 90s Bell Labs so that, as a pre-teenager trapped in rural Illinois, I could run Plan 9 and build some software for it.

Gnot or Blit terminals? Oh man if its a Gnot....

I'm Gnot saying it isn't one... ;)

You can get access to people at age 12 that you wouldn't get in a million years at age 20.

You shouldn’t stop trying at age 20 (or 30, or 40...), as long as you are earnest, not too much bother, and aren’t worried about not always getting a response.

If you show interest in people’s work, especially if you have questions, corrections, etc. that demonstrate that you are engaging with it seriously, even “famous” people are often happy to respond (but people certainly also often don’t respond to cold emails, for a wide variety of reasons).

RMS is pretty famous for responding to pretty much any query, for better or worse. There's a treasure trove of fantastic email responses to questions like "do you watch anime?" and "what do you think of my birthday card?"

I've seen a number of people rag on him, espousing that he's got nothing else to do (they may well be right) but it makes me respect the guy even more to know that he's replying to emails, even when they're dumb, instead of watching TV or browsing Twitter. He's a real consummate professional, even when the people around him aren't.

I dimly recall receiving a call from RMS one Saturday when I must have been in high school. I was working (on my own) on porting the ETH Modula-2 compiler from VAX/VMS to a NS32032 based "co-processor" board that plugged into the pc isa bus (an early hardware design from Trevor Marshall of YARC Systems). I think RMS asked if I would port the compiler to GNU, but alas I told him I knew nothing about Unix back then. The NS32032 went no where, but my compiler porting effort got me my first job with an interesting (to me) startup!

> RMS is pretty famous for responding to pretty much any query

Can confirm. In 1990, I managed to send him a letter from a borrowed Internet account (I didn't have an email address at the time.) He tracked me down and telephoned me(!!), I still remember his friendly demeanor, and at the end of the conversation he said "Happy hacking!".

I'm 40 now! I'd better start emailing people :D

Ever actually tried? I've contacted well-known people in their field (most recently Hugh Darwen for an obscure database question) and I find them very willing to help if you don't waste their time. Stop with the it's-all-stacked-against-us-don't-even-try bullshit.

It's not about being stacked against one, it's more that one understands the constraints other might have and is more hesitant to reach out, instead of doing a round more of research yourself and using more general forums first.

It's crazy to realise that these people you look up to are actually other human beings and with just a little bit of luck you can strike up a normal conversation with them and they won't hate you for it!

I am scared to ask another team question about my work without checking documentation twice because I'm scared I'll ask something that's already covered in detail somewhere.

I am very good at asking stupid questions. Thankfully, my teammates are patient with me.

Can you imagine wasting the time of one of the brilliant minds of our times and it turns out to be user error?

I would say try to sleep on a problem before reaching out for help if time permits. Probably isn't good for business but it is good for my personal development.

Exactly what you say; sleep on it first. Make sure you've done your background work. But then, don't be afraid to contact them.

> I am very good at asking stupid questions. Thankfully, my teammates are patient with me.

Are your questions really so stupid, are theirs really so much smarter when they ask, or are you being harsh on yourself perhaps.

It depends. Most famous people in tech aren't going to answer easily Googleable questions from a 20-year-old (or a 40 year old) But if you've got a genuine reason to be asking them, they respond more frequently than you'd think.

I wanted to use a purported quote from Maurice Wilkes that I couldn't track down a citation for in the introduction to my PhD thesis, so I emailed him. He must have been well into his eighties by that point. I got a very helpful reply and was able to use the quotation, properly cited (as well as add a "Wilkes, personal communication" to my citation list, which still makes me smile).

But what was the quote!?

One of my achievements in life is a email exchange I had at around the same age with someone from Cray, a conversation sparked after a newsgroup post about the model of computers used in the book version of Jurassic Park.

It wasn’t anything as extensive as what op is talking about but it made a deep impression on me. Something like the nerdling equivalent to getting a baseball hat signed. The potential with email to speak directly with people working in rarefied places was eye opening. It also gave a real confidence boost that I could stumble on interesting things to say.

i still get access at age 45; I think what changes is not the propensity of people to answer but the audacity of people to ask.

The motivations of adults are, usually, not the same as those of younger people, so that some people may be more skeptical to respond, too. Obviously, I'm generalizing here. But there are logical reasons behind that.

I think also people just instinctively feel bad turning down a child's request.

There's also that if you're 45 years old, people expect to see some accomplishments, and are skeptical if you don't have any, whereas there is no such bar for 12-year-olds other than perhaps curiosity and ambition.

It’s more that I’m happy to help people if they show me they’ve done their homework. The homework required of a 12 year old is obviously zero, because if they’re asking me they already know more than they should.

I dunno, I feel like I'm pretty close to the aforementioned Rob Pike and Ken Thompson through working with Go; I feel like if I ever had a deep question about or issue with the language I could reach out to them through the mailing list. It's more a matter of having something to talk to them about than finding and reaching them I think.

Indeed, that tends to change again in your 1000030’s.

The ghost of Steve Jobs would disagree - "Make the call". Anyway it's awesome you can form spontaneous human connection with other people from most surprising of places if you only try. I suppose the pathological twist to this is all of those phone-center scams...

The nice thing about celebrities in academic worlds is that they're so much more accessible than celebrities in big-money industries like acting or business. Their email is publicly available on their university pages, and IME they respond kindly and quickly.