1981: Geeks Inc.
This is the 5th in a short series of articles around my 4-decade+ career in software development — for your amusement, edification, and to capture a bit of computing history. They also bring back some memories for me, fond and otherwise.
As an impressionable freshman at Eleanor Roosevelt High School (ERSH¹), I was definitely impressed by the graduating seniors (class of ’79). They appeared to have a sizeable stable of cool kids. They had a cool band play at the year-end school fair, and they published an underground newspaper, “ICE,” that talked about the school and cool things like Cheap Trick. Desperate to be a cool kid but knowing I was already pigeonholed as a geek, I wanted to one-up the underground newspaper the moment I saw it.
By the time of my sophomore year, I was predictably hanging out with a handful of not-cool kids who straddled the edge of social acceptability. We were quick to make fun of BS when we saw it. We banded together strongly, and decided to flaunt our outsider status.
Custom t-shirts were a bit trendy in 1981. I convinced Mike, Larry, and Dan to have black & white t-shirts and hats printed at the local mall, each emblazoned with our new brand, “Geeks Inc.” I pictured us as a troupe of shameless trouble-makers bucking against society. Alex DeLarge and Devo were likely slices of inspiration for the notion of having a uniform at all.
Geeks and Nerds
I was intimately familiar with the term geek from the professional wrestler Fred Blassie’s 1977 song “Pencil Neck Geek.” (Over 45 years later, I still remember all the lyrics.)
What’s a geek? Well, my trusty red American Heritage dictionary (the coolest one available at the time, because it included definitions for all the foul language I’d learned) informed me that a geek was “a carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.” The word derives from the English dialect word geck, meaning fool, which in turn comes from the German/Dutch gek meaning mad or silly.
Yes: mad, silly, foolish. That’ll work. We viewed nerds as distinctly different — perhaps irredeemably socially awkward at their very core. We were of course social misfits, but embraced our obsessions to the point of appearing a bit mad. We knew we could emerge to be social butterflies if necessary, but we really didn’t want to.
Mind you, the word “geek” wasn’t really in common use at the time; Best Buy’s Geek Squad wasn’t prominent until the early 2000s. The movie Revenge of the Nerds — an apologia for antisocial folk similar to us, and one that you couldn’t make today — wouldn’t be released until 1984. Geeks, whatever we were, were definitely deserving of disdain in 1981.
By 1983 things were no different. In 1983 I DJ’d a University of Maryland alternative music radio show named Early Ecstasy (I was an XTC fan and my inaugural slot was 3am Saturday). When I earned a better time slot, I renamed my show to Geek Music. I was surprised to hear that a woman from the university’s administrative review board, which oversaw the radio station, found my show name offensive.
Celebrating geekism might be trashy, a la John Waters, and unfitting of an esteemed institution such as the University of Maryland (est: 1856), but offensive? My show’s prior name seemed much worse. Still, I was quite gratified that my name choice had provoked some sort of revulsion.
Geeks on Parade
Wearing the Geeks Inc² t-shirts and hats to school took a little bravery. But after their first couple of appearances, the logo didn’t seem to get the rise out of people that we’d hoped for. Ah well, we were in the geek component of what was a science & technology magnet school — busloads of smarty, frustrated teens traveled from all corners of rather-diverse Prince George’s County to study daily at ERHS. It was ultimately unsurprising that my classmates accepted a bit of madness.
What to do with our pseudo-incorporation of Geeks, then? Blowing up things around town with fireworks, making lighter-fluid cannons, and wearing t-shirts wasn’t going to be enough. (In hindsight I wish we’d dreamed up Fight Club. Damn.)
Birthing Newsgeek
We decided we would one-up the class of 1979 and its ICE underground paper. I’d been waiting for this moment for over two years! It was time to use the power of the press to promote our cause. We got together and started brainstorming our own underground rag.
We enlisted Frank Gomez, a brilliant artist, to provide illustrations. We filled the paper with a bit of muckraking (we savaged the abomination of the latest yearbook, something I still feel a bit guilty about) and a pile of deeply sophomoric humor. Our pages were littered with:
- jokes about butts, foul language, and geeks
- a few subversive National-Lampoonish pieces
- a handful of demented little comics and artwork from Frank, including a twisted 9-panel full-page piece about the risks of nose picking
The cool Industrial Arts teacher Mr. Ludke (not to be confused with the other two IA teachers, one of whom I had a personal vendetta against) sponsored two after-school clubs that some of us attended — Diplomacy and Chess. He ran both run the same afternoon in his spacious basement workshop. Mr. Ludke also ran the school’s printing press, and more than happily promised to help us print our little project.
The title for the underground paper? Well, Newsgeek, of course, with a tag line of “And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth.”
Over the space of a few days, I typed up eight pages worth of content using Mike’s mom’s IBM Selectric II typewriter, keeping column widths to about 3" so that it’d look like a real newspaper. We dedicated a full page to Frank’s awesome booger comic.
The Correcting Selectric II was supposed to support fixing typographical errors (typos). If you messed up, you could press a correction key to cause the typewriter to back up by one character. The typewriter would type subsequent characters using a correction ribbon that printed in white instead of black.
Sadly, Mike’s mom’s Selectric correction feature needed a bit of correction itself. I was relegated to fixing the inevitable typing errors I would make using Wite-Out, a white “correction fluid.” I’d dab a bit of this glorified white paint onto each typo, let it dry for a second, then type over the painted character.
We faced other challenges. Mike’s mom’s typewriter ribbons had been long overused and were banged up, quite literally, so the printed characters weren’t sufficiently dark on the paper. We cut the articles up and pasted them in place using tape and copious amounts of Wite-Out, much to the dismay of Mike’s mom (apparently a little bottle of the stuff wasn’t cheap).
The net effect of excessive Wite-Out, faded print, and hand-assembled layout was to give our otherwise painstaking efforts a shambolic look. God I hoped it would look good when printed!
Mr. Ludke showed us how the offset printing process worked and set up the plates for us. From our shambolism emerged a modicum of professionalism. Hey, we learned useful stuff in the process!
Geeks Forever
Maybe a couple hundred copies made their way through the school of about 2,000 students. It was awesome and a little nerve-wracking wandering the hallways and watching people read through it. Seeing folks laugh was a real treat. So was seeing a few looks of disgust from the sorts of people we knew would react that way.
Just to be safe, we dropped a copy in the Vice Principal Clingan’s mail inbox in the principal’s office. Showing we weren’t trying to hide anything might be what saved us from getting suspended, something we’d heard they wanted to do. Having Mr. Ludke help us with printing was probably another wise choice — I suppose they would’ve had to discipline him as well were they to suspend us. Thanks Mr. Ludke!
Hopefully this article sets the historical record straight, for those possibly confused by all the fake news and historical revisionism about geeks. I honestly miss the days when we were counterculture.
In any case, I claim the title OG — Original Geek — from here on out. I hope one day to return all like-minded brethren to the original counterculture realm of geekdom — where we are mysterious, capable, a little bit dangerous, and held in disdain.
In the meantime, geek and ye shall find.
¹ Eleanor Roosevelt High School, 7601 Hanover Parkway, Greenbelt, Maryland, 20770
² We never officially trademarked Geeks Inc.; that was a mistake. Unfortunately there are at least two companies named Geeks Inc (one .com and one .net), something I’ve wanted to rebrand as.
I looked at other names: TheGeeks.com, for example. That one is held by a scumbag domain cybersquatter. They offered it up for $20,000 when I inquired a few years ago. I countered at $100. I haven’t heard from them… yet. Ah well.
