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The geeks will inherit the earth

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 12 Jun 2002 17:16 BST

It was a rainy day in Kings Cross, and something strange was happening. A queue had formed on the puddly pavement outside the back entrance to Camden Town Hall, and was damply waiting for the doors to open -- but what a queue. It wasn't quite every possible configuration of white male homo sapiens, but it was close, and it wasn't dressed in every possible permutation of clothing that people who don't care about clothes might throw on, but that was close too.

Inside, something marvellous has happened -- NTK has come alive. You know NTK, Need To Know, the nasty, British and short satirical weekly high-tech newsletter run by the intermittently famous Dan O'Brien and Dave Green. It was its birthday not so long ago, so D&D decided to have a celebratory convention. A bit of morphing later, and Extreme Computing 2002 was born in a black cloud of sulphurous smoke and overheated ZX81 16K RAM Packs.

Imagine a large -- although not large enough -- hall packed with trestle tables around the edge, filled in the middle with seats and with a stage at the far end. A procession of nerdniks appeared on the stage throughout the day to talk about nuclear spacecraft, strap-on Spectrums, origami, Web logs and all points south. Famous physicists mingle with forgotten one-hit-wonders of 80s technopop, 70s survival beards and ponytails frolic happily with 21st century slapheads. There's a robotic parrot sausage. It's a heady mix.

And on the trestle tables, it's the Antiques Roadshow revisited by William Gibson. There are piles of old BBCs, Spectrums, C64s and peripherals -- of course -- but these are just the vanguard. Look at the back, where someone's built their own Spectrum out of mail-order bits, or where strange prototypes for computers that never were have been rescued from the wreckage of Sinclair Research. These things are known to the crowd, and loved. Or if that's not your thing, there's a man with briefcases. One contains a complete pirate radio station; another a device for surreptitiously planting seeds in peoples' lawns -- you wander around for a bit spelling out a rude word, then come back in the growing season.