Today, in a chat room I frequent, several people were discussing Greek mythology and someone misread their statements as “geek mythology”, prompting them to ask the question, “what do we believe that constitutes a myth?” Merriam-Webster defines a myth as “1: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon; 2: a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone, especially one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society.”
Given that definition, and limiting the meaning of “geek” to those whose geekdom is at least partially attributable to a love of computers, I think we certainly have myths. Take, for example, the etymology of the software “bug”. Most geeks are probably familiar with a generalized account of someone solving computer errors by removing moths stuck in the circuitry. Some might name former Adm. Grace Hopper the seminal debugger, while others would point to other operators of the Mark II or other early computers. Persons who have studied the issue carefully seem to believe that such an event happened, although the date and people involved are disputed, but that the term was used in general engineering before the invention of the electronic computer.
There are other widely circulated stories that most likely did occur more or less as described, perhaps multiple times to different people, but for which the origin is unknown. Consider the case of the luser who called technical support to complain about the failure of his computer’s “cup holder” (CD-ROM drive tray), or the “Big Red Switch”-pushing programmer’s daughter for whom the Molly Guard was named. We have heroic epics, both historical (the work by Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park to break German cryptography during World War II) and fictional (the many hackers who perished in grue attacks). There are never-ending conflicts, such as the one between spammers and those who would oppose them, in which either side may win battles through the ages but neither is vanquished.
There are philosophers of geekdom (Richard Stallman) as well as chroniclers (Eric S. Raymond), villains (Steve Ballmer), and legends (Dennis Ritchie), as well as wizards who wear black hats or white ones. We have treasured artifacts, such as Knuth reward checks and pieces of UNIVAC.
A mythology would not be complete without documentation, and geeks have plenty of that. The Jargon File is a catalogue of geekly lingo with stories, some verified and other apocryphal, regarding its sources. The Theoretical Computer Science Genealogy project is a deep but incomplete account of the “ancestry” of many of the important geeks. We even have our own Atlantis, a magical but lost land, in Bell Labs.
Although the vast majority of this mythology is set in the last half century, the frenetic pace of technological advancement makes stories of even 10 years ago seem as foreign as ancient history. Thus, it is entirely reasonable that elder geeks pass down their wisdom to new generations of wide-eyed young people who aspire to geekdom. In my opinion, geeks have a rich mythology, a well-defined ethos, and a high culture that should be envied by members of other interest or occupation-centered social groups.