inhibitor.

Maybe 'geek' (now) is generally associated with anything cerebral(?) and with attendant minutiae, lore which must be stuffed into brain-pan ... all deathly stuff to the casual mind in search of simple pleasures, mostly.
But computer-geek multiplies the amount of lore stuffed into such folks' vocabularies -- with new armies of inscrutable TLAs / onion layers of complexity, akin to codebreaking with no plaintext in sight:
impossible to 'explain' in KISS manner -- yet so many have tried. (Usually artlessly IME.)

Big Science membership OTOH might be thought to produce that earlier 'nerd' (of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and successor flic.)
My experience has been, when queried and the accelerator word arose: you still get a break, if your 'explanation' makes suitably cute use of the baseball-on-a-string analogy, and you don't segue into anything which sounds tutorial. The girlfriends of my SO thought the topic even interesting-enough to want to see the place, etc. ('Course too, SO was enroute to a marine bio degree, so no culure clash there.)

Not yet very clear why the computer add-on is so stifling; could be that the picture of the field is an imagining that it's all head-work with arcane logical shorthands (as, of course it mostly is)
-- maybe akin to the Chess Master game (entirely in-head.) It's an alien concept to anyone who has never delved deeply into how Anything 'works'
-- you know -- all those biz-majors who couldn't grok basic algebra, can't replace a plastic light cover (never mind change the switch.)

These fast/dumb machines are just too abstruse for being, literally, The Universal Machine (is my guess.)
General science things can be related to say ... going to moon; you can show someone a circuit board (even!) and they will look with fascination when you say:
this is going into space, eventually beyond the solar system: to count mesons, when we've calibrated the sucker. Ooooh!!

Not long ago - -
Someone who had at least grokked how Greek stuff like milli-, micro-, nano ... gets to --> pico: was fascinated to *see*, on a scope: a rise time of half a nSec or so (TD pulser)
-- when explained that this 'pulse' had changed from 0 to 1 volt: and you could SEE that happening in "half a billionth of a second!" (actually the scope cart was in my kitchen, in the event..)

'Course: to someone who can't ÷1000 in-head: the above would go ^Zoooom^.
Maybe play the intro to 2nd Brandenburg instead, if you happen to have a clarino handy?

It's ALL Theatre! doncha know??
Guess computer types need to come up with some much better choreography ... before they get Respect. Eh?