I suspected that the whole “geek culture” around computers started to grow around the time when video games were heavily marketed to young boys. And it’s natura

I suspected that the whole “geek culture” around computers started to grow around the time when video games were heavily marketed to young boys. And it’s natural that through video games these young boys would have grown interest in computers and eventually programming. I admit that this theory needs quite a lot more research though. (Maybe it’s the other way around, the prevalence of male geek culture changed the landscape of video game marketing? Or perhaps it’s not just cause-and-effect and more of a positive feedback loop.) The funny thing is that at the start of the video game industry (I would mark that as the Atari era), TV advertisements for it really didn’t marketed it specifically for boys, it was more for “the whole family” and for both boys and girls. The heavily gendered marketing started in the Nintendo era (years after the Atari shock), around the late-80s to early-90s you see a large shift in style of TV video game ads. I don’t currently have links to the TV ad archives, but you can find lots of it on Youtube.