Early Nerds

There are thousands of stories about those amazing computers that have transformed our lives so profoundly. Most of them focus on the accomplishments that computer people made, the cleverness and brilliant insight that led to our current tech world. This is not one of those books.

This is a collection of fictional stories about the early computer scientists from the 1970s and 1980s. Computer nerds appear in fiction quite often, typically as unappealing slobs who nevertheless save the day. The nerds in those stories are one-dimensional characters who exist only to advance the plot to its thrilling finale. Once again, this is not one of those books.

The stories here paint a full view of the early nerds, and each of my characters is a someone I've known, with appearances, personalities, and back history mostly intact. To protect them, I've changed their names, given them nicknames, and made up the main plots of each story. I don't care what actually happened, only what might have happened and perhaps should have happened. This is the human side of the nerd revolution, real people with complex lives they balanced while playing with computers long before it became popular.