Since 1973 (when I sent my first CQ CQ CQ on Father
Allardyce’s ham radio at St Patricks College in Silverstream, NZ) I have
officially been a geek.

This was compounded during my University days in New
Zealand, Australia and Hungary where I joined every radio club available.

In Hungary radio clubs were frowned on, unless a Communist
Party member was also a member of the group. Then we could use our illegal
Kenwood TS120S to talk to the world as long as ‘Comrade Party Member’ was present.

In fact it was because of ‘Comrade Party Member’ that I
became a hacking geek. How could we utilize the University’s radio tower with
the Kenwood and talk to CB radio operators in the West? First we needed a 27mhz
crystal and then a repeater mode looped inside the TS120. Voila – we could now
sit in my dorm room with a discrete half-wave wire antennae on the roof
(looking like a clothesline) to use the University’s 160W peak output power to
talk to the world. And talk we did, about ‘Comrade This’, ‘Comrade That’ and
the price of luxuries in the west; specifically, which shops in Austria had
them so we could hop the border on the weekends.

We also played our favourite music tracks to each other and
the DX sessions quite often had three renditions of the same tune – first in
English then in German then in Hungarian.

Lets get back to geeks.

In the 80’s, geeks were those strange nerdy types with
pencil pocket protectors that actually housed jewelers screwdrivers and not
actually pencils. And I moved from radios to computers (IBM running CPM and
AT&T 3B2 running Unix.).

In the nineties, the geeks started incorporating soho
businesses that assembled PC’s with funny brand names – and started writing and
distributing shareware. Then the Internet arrived.

The commercial geeks started setting up ISP’s whilst a new
class of geek was quietly born: the über-geek.

The über-geek only did technical stuff and wasn’t interested
in the dollars and cents. He probably wasn’t an academic and probably worked in
a little bedroom at mum’s place with the curtains pulled, never coming out of
his room.

Über-geek geeks were on a mission. They wanted peer review.
They wanted fame. They wanted to be Bill Gates.

When any new business first starts up there is a predictable
growth curve. There are the early adopters (4% of the population); followed by
their friends and relatives (11% of the population); followed by their friends and their relatives (17%
of the population); so that by the end of the 3^rd year the business
has a 32% market penetration of its intended customer target population.

In my years on the net, I have met a fair few über-geeks,
usually at NANOG meetings and the like, and usually I get on with them rather
well and because of the talk – they accept me as one of their own. We speak a
secret language:the language of knowledge.

For example – no über-geek I have even known has even
considered that Australia’s Internet Filter can work. Why? Because we know
about the holes in Bind version 9.0.; and if we know about the holes, then
there are some black hat über-geeks running phishing, warez and other nefarious
activities that also know. So we don’t mention it.

Recently an über-geek (whom I’ll call AK) visited me from
the UK. And we
sat down in my Bonsai “garden” and started the normal “Hey dude what’s up”? and
as AK was talking I looked down on the coffee table noting the Nokia, the TRIO
and the iPhone but no laptop. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with
the brand of phones that AK has – its just that in the 12 years I have known
him, he has always carried a laptop.

“…. Dude, where’s your OQO?” I interrupted.

“Tom, I’m trying an experiment. This is my first trip ever
without a laptop and so far so good. I haven’t needed it. I can do everything I
need to do on these three phones and I even have redundancy.”

There it was – My friend and colleague admitting that he, as
one of the top 10 unlisted über-geeks in the world perhaps, no longer needed a
laptop to achieve all of his connectivity, email and data requirements whilst
on the move.

So I can now cheerfully predict that by next year laptop
sales will have dropped at least 4%, the following year at least 11% with 17%
the year after that.

On the positive side, I see a massive increase in Smartphone
alternatives with the appropriate price reductions.

Convergence has arrived. Now we just need to get the billing
right.

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