Simon Willison’s Weblog

I've long been a Lego fan. In the '70s, I used to collect great quantities of space Lego, but I never really upgraded to Lego Technic. Eventually, Lego started making to many specialized parts for my liking, and I was spending too much time playing with Big Trak.

I never owned a Commodore 64. I had a 48K Sinclair Spectrum (with the rubber keyboard), which I expanded to include Interface 1 and microdrives. I even have a few '80s games, like Manic Miner and Knight Lore, which I run on an emulator. I'll never forget how much better the speech synthesis sounded in the C64 version of Ghostbusters!

Simon Jessey - 7th May 2004 02:49 - #

I consider myself a geek, and yet spent many of my formative years kicking a football around. I still play 5-a-sides once a week, but also spend huge amounts of time geeking about on my Linux-based home network.

Ben Thorp - 7th May 2004 08:42 - #

I side with Ben on this one. Though not as much a geek as some (but probably more so that I actually think), I didn't really have a particularly geeky background. There was a Spectrum floating around (still in a cupboard somewhere), and the obligatory lego (including technic), but that was about it.

I'm one of the more active people I know, yet possibly one of the geekier too. So I don't know. Maybe I was born with it. My dad's a secret geek - wasn't aware for years that he was. He hid under the masquerade of working in a book warehouse, and didn't inform me quite what he was actually doing there.

Andrew - 7th May 2004 09:11 - #

I spent my childhood training in dance and doing nothing technical at all, and yet I'm more geeky than a very geeky thing now ... we did have a lot of lego though. My 6 year old now spends a lot of her time playing with lego, so perhaps I am developing a geek for the future?

Rachel - 7th May 2004 10:18 - #

I used to be a trainspotter (no, really!), but gave that up when I discovered girls ;)

Apparently, compulsive behaviour like trainspotting and--dare I say it--a prediliction for technology, is a mild form of autism, found (surprise, surprise) more often in males than females.

Tim - 7th May 2004 10:28 - #

/me flashes his season pass to LegoLand and makes no further comment.

Drew McLellan - 7th May 2004 11:36 - #

Playing with Lego expands the mind and brings out creativity; I was playing Chess by the age of four, yes I a probably do have some geek-traits or I wouldn't be passing by here.

Robert Wellock - 7th May 2004 11:39 - #

Quote: "I attribute a lot of my geekiness to exposure to both Lego technic and a C64 from an early age, but would I still have been drawn towards geeky endeavours if I'd spent my childhood kicking a football around instead?" You should instead ask yourself what made you gravitate towards the Legos and the C64 'instead of' the football. Yes, your first thought was correct, you inherited the propensity or inclination towards 'geeky' stuff, just as most all geeks. It's in your genes. SWMF

Selfish White MF - 7th May 2004 14:41 - #

Quote:
"I attribute a lot of my geekiness to exposure to both Lego technic and a C64 from an early age, but would I still have been drawn towards geeky endeavours if I'd spent my childhood kicking a football around instead?"

You should instead ask yourself what made you gravitate towards the Legos and the C64 'instead of' the football. Yes, your first thought was correct, you inherited the propensity or inclination towards 'geeky' stuff, just as most all geeks. It's in your genes.

SWMF

Selfish White MF - 7th May 2004 14:43 - #

I was a very shy child and spent a lot of time on my own as a result and spent a vast proportion of that time building things with Lego. I think there are genetic reasons why Lego appealed. My dad had good spatial ability, he worked as a wall and floor tiler and took great pride in his precise, ordered work. I used to spend holidays working with him and no doubt picked up things from his work that I applied to my nice, solid Lego buildings ;)

Dan Brusca - 8th May 2004 14:13 - #

I think it's largely in the way we are nurtured as children. I remember my dad used teach me extra maths in the evenings sometimes. I was lapping up things like square roots three years before I was taught it in school. When he first introduced me to BASIC, I must have been about 8 years old.

The first program he showed me how to write took the names of two objects and their heights and came up with a response like 'if a dog stood on a cat, their height would be 30 inches.' Simple.. but I saw at that point the potential of programming. The idea of making a complex machine perform exactly as you want has got to appeal to anyone - and starting with simple PC's (I had an 8086 then a 286, 386, 486sx, 486dx et al) and simple techniques I was never overwhelmed, as some people are with the potential of today's machines. I think it's important to start from the bottom up.

I had this amazing Mario game watch in Junior school and was the envy of the playground. I lent it to kids in exchange for their dinner money.. and I recorded the loans and worked out my "profits" on a database I created in Dataease. Definitely started as a geek at an early age!

I guess it was the financial incentive all along.. At 15, using Compuserve net access, I made my first big website - the Jenny McCarthy Picture Database. At it's peak it had a top Yahoo listing, and a niche - it was getting 2000 hits a day. I slapped a banner on it and was raking in the dollars.. unfortunately I tried to "increase the effectiveness" of the banner and was blacklisted. I scammed the ads by asking people to click the banner and return to my site with the first word on the sponsor's page, using it as a password for premium access to Jenny McCarthy pics. It worked for ages and I was getting cheques for $400 a month. I shut the site down once and for all when Playboy emailed me personally and threatened to take legal action over my abuse of their copyright!

Anyway, I digress! I think the bottom line is that geekhood is sparked at an early age. I'd be interested to know more about Tim's autism theory.

Chris Beach - 9th May 2004 03:26 - #

I think this is down to both nature and nurture, judging by my own family.

My older brother and I are alike in many ways, both physically (although he isn't as grey as me :-) and mentally (same, rather strange, sense of humour, etcetera). Yet he has little or no understanding of technology, and would struggle with changing a plug, while I actually enjoy debugging assembly language, and still sometimes program in Forth, just for fun.

The key difference: at an early age (about 11 onwards, given the way the UK's educational system was structured back then) he was identified as a bright kid, and was therefore put into the top streams at school, which meant learning Greek, Latin and so on, and ultimately led to a law degree from Oxford. When I came in for the same kind of assessment, I was at a school which had always had a reputation for embracing science and technology, and thus was encouraged to follow such pursuits (although I still got the Latin) and to hang around the school's computer room (PDP8/e, if you're wondering). Result: he's a lawyer who can't change a plug; I'm a geek who can understand law.

So I believe that one does tend towards, or is capable at, geekish pursuits because of having a certain kind of mind, but the direction in which one is encouraged has a direct effect.

Nick Fitzsimons - 10th May 2004 10:15 - #

I think The Portrait of a Hacker defines a geek rather nicely. The sad thing is, I can identify with most of it!!! :-)

DarkBlue - 16th May 2004 01:14 - #

Some links re. the autism/asperger's aspect:

• Google search for autism+trainspotting
• The Guardian - 1
• The Guardian - 2

Tim - 20th May 2004 17:43 - #