My father worked for NACA and NASA for from the 1930s to the 1970s. He started at Langley Field in the 30s, and then moved to Cleveland when the NASA Lewis Research Center was being built to run the Instrumentation Labs. He “ran” them, I should add, not in the bureaucratic sense of being Top Director, but in the sense of managing and making them work: he was the second-tier director, who got his people to do things. He managed the wind tunnel design and construction, all the testing labs, the model-building group, the installation of the first computers installed at NASA Lewis. I was too young (was born just a few years before he retired), but I have the ephemera and keepsakes and anecdotes from my Mom here that show me he knew all the famous test pilots, sat in the X-13, built camera systems for atomic bomb tests. Carefully packed in a box around the house somewhere is a reflector identical to the ones—made in the same lot with—cubic corner reflectors sitting on the Moon right now. Last I heard, you can still shine a laser on it and see the reflected light.

See: I am nerd, and nerd-born.

In the 1930s–70s, the dominant geek hobbyist fields were radio, electronics and aeronautics, with a residual speck of the amateur photography fad (which held sway among the Real Geeks of the earlier 1890s-1920s wave) thrown in for good measure. My Dad, my uncle (a ham radio geek), and their network of engineering buddies all had “radio rooms”: old bureaus full of tubes and project boxes, manuals and shelves full of QST and Scientific American, packages ordered from Edmund Scientific. Little magnets stuck on all the file cabinets. In the 1970s, when they had started to retire, they platted out their hobbyist extravaganzas in the form of boxes of mysterious surplus electronica: Nitinol wire, 0.001 gauge platinum wire, photocopier illuminators, rheostats in the original packing, unlabeled test equipment, boxes of loose transistors, half a liter of mercury just in case.

I vividly remember the summer day when my Dad advised me, when I was rooting around in a drawer in the old beat up bureau in the garage, that the big (big) transmitter tubes there were all we really needed to put together a 50-mile-radius radar set. And the 12-inch glass lens blanks were all we needed to make a telescope with which we would be able to see the bands of Jupiter. And so forth.

All these amazing projects remained undone. We weren’t (surely I don’t seem to be) the kind of people who finish things; we start them, revel in potential, know the stuff to finish them is there for when we need it. The best laid plans of mice and aficionados, as they say. My stint in elementary school and cub scouts in the ’70s made us focus our creative energies more on puppets and windmills and Halloween costumes, not radar and telescopes.

About 15 years ago, my Dad died after a difficult series of health problems. My Mom now lives with us, her household—including my Dad’s remaining lab stuff—is packed in boxes in the basement and garage. We root around among it, we think a lot about the house we’re going to build. We plan to sell the things we cannot use… if only we knew which ones those were. My interests, from this standpoint of halfway through my life, are less concerned with hardware and much more focused on social systems, wetware and software.

What I see in those boxes is a broad, longitudinal slice of technical hobbyists’ practices of the mid-20th Century.

For the last three years I’ve been working, as a Ph.D. student, in the place where hobbyist practices for the Real Geeks of the mid-21st Century are being developed. A lot of my colleagues don’t know it yet, of course: they think their work will change the world without “falling down” within the reach of mere amateurs. They don’t understand what grid computing and social network theory and high-capacity energy systems and nanofabrication will become; they see only the big prize of New! Tech! Now!, not the eager eyes of the swarms of hobbyists who will take this work and integrate it into the real world. Nothing new there.

Innovators are often very bad at generalizing and predicting what will really come of their work. In Academia especially, the many uses of an innovation must be masked and downplayed: too general-sounding a plan, and you threaten to violate the boundaries of your discipline, or at best show sad symptoms of hubris. To say a thing may become another thing, unplanned-for, is to tread dangerously close to generalism; ‘ware that boundary, and stick to your chosen well-lit path.

In research, in advanced studies of all sorts, we are forced to say what our work is for so often that we come to imagine that a project’s success will only lead to what we have planned. That it will arrive as we expect, all at once, everywhere, like Athena from a forehead. Some subset of active researchers imagine that they are having a conversation, and that their work will move on to become the framework of further and better innovations in some other high-powered lab. But I’ve yet to meet an inventor who explicitly sees the role their work will play for the Makers of the future: How it will play out in the garages of the next three decades. Let alone the other disciplines.

I’ve spent time in garages, real and metaphoric, all my life, shuffling through components and ideas that have escaped the bounds of their originators’ plans. By roundabout track from mothballed storage or military surplus catalog or 1970s Polish computer science journal or humanities paper, things become other than they were originally intended. The cutting edge dulls but slowly. Exaptation happens in the garages of the world, not in the hallowed work of society’s great minds.

A thing’s proper function is what it is selected for. Design is just one means of selection. Revival, in a new form, another.

In my father’s day, they depended on magazine articles written by überhobbyists and manuals scavenged from credentialed sources. They followed instructions, and made the tuner or the car or the photo set-up by hand, and they were pleased enough, and if they saw something dramatic they sent a letter to the editor or wrote their own article.

But now we have Make and the online communities, YouTube for demonstrations, Creative Commons licensing for instructions. We develop communities of practice, store and share tacit knowledge, distribute results horizontally and directly to the best possible colleagues, and archive it forever, findably on the Internet.

What will change? Will it be better?

Exaptation is happening, right now, in this garage. This garage where the residual backbone of the ARPAnet has been reduced to “mere blogs” and amateurish authority-less pseudoscholarship and dirty movies.

And maybe something more.