The Globe gets it wrong
(Yeah, like that’s a surprise.)
Today’s Boston Globe has an article The Geek Mystique that (triggered by a trademark lawsuit between The Geek Squad and Geek Housecalls) talks about the term and how it’s become “so cool”.
“Geek” has a long history in the English language, and, until the technological age, was the term applied to carnival performers whose talent consisted of biting off the heads of live chickens and snakes. It later became part of the technical lexicon, describing the technologically astute who just as voraciously ate computer bugs, said Brian Jepson, an editor at the technology book publisher O’Reilly Media Inc.
Jepson said he first noticed the term geek gaining positive connotations in 1993, with the introduction of the “geek code”, a method used to compress data to speed up e-mail when modems were painfully slow.
So, if you’re not used to the Globe, you might wonder whether Jepson actually said that the “geek code” was a data compression mechanism or if the Globe reporter screwed up somehow.
Well, Jepson’s blog entry makes it pretty clear:
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. A free copy of one of my books to the first person who posts a comment reconstructing what I originally said.
