1985: The Year Hollywood Discovered Nerds Are Cool

It started in 1983 with WarGames. By 1984, Revenge of the Nerds and The Last Starfighter confirmed it. By the summer of 1985, it was undeniable: Real Genius, Weird Science, My Science Project, Explorers—hell, even the highest-grossing movie of the year was about a kid who hung around a lab-coat-wearing professor who was building something called a “flux capacitor.” Nerds were in.

I was 11 years old that summer, and the flood of tech-themed movies hitting theaters was almost as good as playing “Beyond Castle Wolfenstein” on my Apple IIc. Almost. We might not have known it 30 years ago, but the nation witnessed a cultural shift that summer. All of a sudden, knowing about technology, programming, and data wasn’t something to relegate you to the bleachers during the sixth-grade dance. (Not that something like that ever happened to me—no sir.) No, by 1985, knowing those things was a source of power, of heroism.