I had an old IBM XT clone sitting in my bedroom at the age of 12-13. I brought a friend over once and he called me a nerd. Not the "nerd" of today. Back then it stung. He said it with a bit of disgust, as if he learned some dark secret I had been harboring. I even loaded up Catacomb 3-D (a very early id Software precursor to Wolfenstein 3D) to prove I can be cool too. It didn't really work.
Consider movies at the time that had computer people in it. They were always portrayed as bumbling, inept people with bad greasy haircuts, odd clothing, pimples, and tape holding their glasses together. The hero would always berate them with "speak English, please".
You can also see it in the Seattle sketch comedy "Almost Live" series, whenever they did a bit on Microsoft.
Myself, I learned to avoid mention of my profession when meeting women.
Even at Caltech at the time, being a computer nerd was not popular. Popular was physics (possibly because Feynman was there at the time). Astronomy was popular, too. Back then, however, nobody had any inkling of how much money could be made from computers.
Yes. I am not sure if Bill Gate made the difference in the public image of nerd. May be in the State. Even the Google era in 00s didn't change much. ( May be very briefly during Dot Com bubble ) My first realisation of Tech really going into Mass Market was the Smartphone era in 2010. When you over heard conversion from everyday life people having lunch talking about ISO ( it should be iOS, but they got it wrong ). And Apple, or iPhone became a yearly event that all mainstream media publish. By around 2012 App Developers became "cool".
In some ways I think that was the revenge of the "nerd". Although in another way most of these new "nerd" never experience the 80s, 90s and 00s. And they are very different nerds to those in that era. Too much hype, too little engineering.
