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Notes -
I think in the 1980s nerds and geeks were rather undifferentiated in the public mind. Geeks would have had intellectual interests, but there were a couple of things that separated them from nerds. First, those interests were generally useful skills — building things, fixing things, useful intellectual skills like math and science and later computers. Second, that they actually became quite skilled and those things — they could actually build a rocket model, do a chemical synthesis, write a program or speak a language. Third, they were, while somewhat introverted and awkward, not completely inept at social relationships. Nerds were the ones hyper interested in useless trivia. They’d memorize the call numbers on starships, they’d learn all the lore of their favorite TV shows and movies, they’d be interested in medieval history or something. If those things required skill, they probably wouldn’t be all that good at it. There is a bit of a difference between a Nerd who can quote S2E5 of Babylon 5 from memory and a Geek who can speak Korean because he’s just into learning a language.
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