Geeks Anonymous
A loose high-school group for technically inclined friends that became my online identity and first website.
Geeks Anonymous began around 1994 or 1995, though “began” makes it sound more organized than it was. It was a lunch table, then a group of friends, then a name that followed me onto the web and into other things I built.
The lunch table
I was around grade eight when the group started to take shape. The people changed and the table grew over the next few years, but the common thread was a technical inclination, especially computers, and the relief of finding other people who understood why any of that was interesting.
There were no membership cards, meetings, or officers. The point was mostly having somewhere to be between classes: a regular place to compare whatever we were working on and spend time with people who had similar interests, from grade nine through grade twelve. Most of the people who carried the name forward afterwards did it through an email address rather than a club.
I came up with “Geeks Anonymous” as an inside joke. We all shared the same geeky enthusiasms, and the name made the lunch table sound like a support group for something none of us wanted cured.
From lunch table to domain name
The website first appeared as geeksanon.ab.ca, during the era when Canadian domains were registered beneath a provincial namespace. The .ca registry was still run by hand by John Demco and a group of volunteers at the University of British Columbia, one application at a time.
When direct second-level registrations opened more broadly under CIRA, the site moved to geeksanon.ca. I used it as my personal website for several years, and the name gradually shifted in my mind from one high-school group to a broader idea: the technical, strange, and curious people who recognize one another.
The VA6GA callsign
I obtained the two-letter amateur callsign VA6GA years after the school group had stopped being active. Canadian operators can request a two-letter suffix after five years of holding a certificate, and GA made the choice obvious.
VA6GA is not a club callsign left over from the original group. It is my own continuation of the idea, used for automated radio projects.
Where the idea led
A more concrete continuation arrived in 2009, when I helped found the Edmonton New Technology Society. ENTS took the loose idea of technically curious people finding one another and gave it a society, a shared workshop, and room for projects larger than a lunch table.
More than thirty years on, Geeks Anonymous still is not an organization, which may be why the name has lasted. The group became old friends, the website became part of my online history, and the phrase describes a mindset rather than a membership list.
“If only everything came with pulldown menus and online help.”