Are You a Computer Geek?

As we move further and further into a more technological age, lines begin to blur between where tech savvyness ends and where being a Geek begins.

I have been working with computers since I was 8 years old. I remember the good old days where I would sit there with my dad watching him play Zork for hours on end. In fact that game is one of the reasons I started writing. This was in the mid to late 80's and the machines had no hard drives and ran completely off of 5 & 1/4 inch floppy disk's.

This was all fun and games, but I didn't learn much from the experience. I did however learn to maneuver through the DOS operating system as well as how to execute programs. My real experience didn't start till around June of 1992.

I live in the San Bernardino California area. If you know any history of the area, in June 1992 there was a massive 7.3 earthquake that shook San Bernardino quite harshly. Shopping malls all around the area had the roofs cave in. This was a great tragedy but for us a great learning experience. Because of the earthquake the malls were forced to send all of their computer equipment to the land-fills for insurance purposes, wither they were damaged or not.

This is where my real experience started. My father brought home three PC's that looked more like junk than computers. With a bit of elbow grease we were able to salvage parts from one of the PC's and get the other two working. The obviously more powerful PC my dad decided to keep for himself and I got the less powerful one. The learning experience is that I was able to sit there and piece together the parts of my PC with my father. It caused an ever growing bond between he and I.

Lets fast forward to July of 2008. I've built multiple PC's for myself and for Company's like Intel. I've made special house calls to multiple businesses and friends alike. I picked up a little bit of BASIC programming through some computer classes in High school. I then went to a School for a Networking degree, but lost interest half way through. While there I learned a little HTML as well as a little bit of Visual BASIC. Through all of this I learned that I really don't have an interest in programming. I did on the other hand learn that I love to play video games and see how the story's play themselves out. Hence my interest in writing. Every so often when ever my computer can no longer graphically handle the new games out, I upgrade my PC.

For the better part of 16 years I have been building PC's and teaching those who will listen about computers. Keeping myself up to date has been pretty easy and I think this in itself is enough to qualify me as a Geek.

What do you think? Do you you need to possess Programming skills to be considered a Computer geek? Or is it just a matter of keeping up to date with the Software, Hardware and lingo? Is just building PC's enough to separate you from today's gadget savvy crowd?

Let me know what you think.