From the number of book reviews it must seem that I do quite a bit of reading these days. However, it’s not more than usual, I just have some catch-up to do. Back in 2015 I had a post on “Diary of an 80s computer geek“, a book not about events that shaped computing history but rather a personal story of how computers in the 1980s had on the author. “A Terrible Nerd” by Kevin Savetz is another book in that rare genre, written from the perspective of a teenager and young adult in the 1980s in Southern California. Again there are many stories he tells I can immediately relate to as I had similar experiences back in those days. Like me, Kevin seems to have found interest in computer archeology and he’s quite active in the Atari domain preserving documents and hardware. A great book if you want to step back for a little while from stories about how particular computers, persons and inventions have shaped the industry and just want to dive into personal computing experiences from the 80s.