In recent years, geeks have become accepted (assimilated?) into the mainstream. It's hard to pin down one specific reason, but as a life-long geek, I can attest to the difference in social attitudes toward those of us who can quote Holy Grail from start to finish, or scrape an entire porn website's open directories, organize the resulting files and burn them to a CD with an eighteen line Perl script.

Shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Freaks and Geeks feature characters that geeks can identify with without making us a punchline, and websites like Think Geek specifically cater to us with T-shirts and gizmos that proudly shout to the world, "I'm a geek, and I'm proud!" When did we gain this acceptance, and how did it happen?

Set the wayback machine to 1978 and watch Animal House. Then, jump ahead and watch Revenge of the Nerds and Real Genius. While you're in the 80s, check out The Dark Crystal, too (not because it's relevant, but because it's a pretty fun movie to watch, and since you're already there, you may as well go for it. Hey, if you were a geekling back then, you may even recall being terrified out of your fucking mind by the Skeksis like I was.)

Anyway, these films all have one common theme: misfits are persecuted by the establishment, misfits fight back using intellect and guile, win the war, and get the girl. Geeks were apparently paying attention back then, because we learned that even though we were physically awkward and less interested in kickball than we were in the Fiend Folio, we could somehow use our intellect to one day turn the tables on our tormentors; an entire generation of geeks, whether they were aware of it or not—and whether we'll admit it now or not—were motivated to reach levels of power and success as adults so we could get back at them. When the personal computer came into our homes with programming languages pre-installed and we saw that we could create things using our brains, the first step toward that ultimate revenge was taken.

Over the years, those of us who were laughed at and tormented by the cool kids fooled around with our personal computers and sought escape in worlds like William Gibson's Neuromancer where intellect was celebrated and rewarded, while the cool kids spent their time in a superficial world that rewarded feathered hair, flipped-up collars, perfect teeth and careful navigation of what was capriciously deemed "cool" by the hivemind of the moment.

When technology and information became highly-prized commodities in the 90s as we were all getting out of college, those of us who had spent much of the 80s alone in our darkened bedrooms, bathed in the green or amber glow of a personal computer's CRT while we "jacked in" at 300 baud to FidoNet and the few of us who were lucky enough to have access to the real Matrix (ARPANet) when 56k was but a dream for mortals had a head start on an entirely new world. While the popular kids continued what Lester Bangs called "the long journey to the middle," we were using our passion for computers and knowledge to found companies and change the way people communicated with each other. It wasn't long before we became our own demographic, and not just any demographic—a demographic that was inherently smart, and had a lot of disposable income. Suddenly, mainstream companies were marketing to us, and in the dot com boom, we finally threw the massive parties we were never invited to when we were younger. The geeks may not have inherited the Earth, but we certainly had arrived, and now we got a say in what was cool.

I knew some of the computer hackers of the late 80s who were described in The Hacker Crackdown; in the 90s, many of them went to work for AT&T, UUNet, or other backbone Internet providers. They joked that, after years of trying to own the phone systems and the Internet with social engineering and brute force cracking, it had finally happened legitimately. Today, many of them own multi-million dollar security consulting firms. While Google is one assimilation away from being the new Borg, Microsoft rightfully earned that description and embodied it for at most of the last two decades. There's a joke about how much it must suck to be the guy who was Bill Gates' bully, but there's a real kernel of truth to it. I know that if I had anything to do with it, there are a few people who would never be able to quite get that credit rating fixed. Yeah, it's petty, but it takes a long time to get the taste of locker out of your mouth, believe me.

Tony Montana was right when he said, "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." We geeks just substituted computers for power, and, sadly, many of us have substituted home theaters for women . . . well, we are geeks, after all, and girls totally have cooties.

At least we're moderately cool, for the time being, and any cool kid who wants to argue with us better have a damn good firewall.

Wil Wheaton is the author of Just A Geek. His blog is pretty geeky, too.