Global Nerdy

This little trove of photos is entirely Anil Dash’s fault. He recently made a blog post titled How Markdown Took Over the World with a “hero image” featuring a 2002-era iMac setup — the G4 model, which Jony Ive described as the answer to the question “What computer would the Jetsons have had?”

I stumbled across Anil’s article on a Sunday afternoon while doing some home office housekeeping, and thought, Wow, there’s a blast from the past, which was quickly followed by Hey, didn’t I get someone to take a photo of me with one of those iMacs when they were only days old?

Unlike some people, I’ve been archiving my digital photos since I bought my first digital camera in 1998, so it didn’t take long for me to dig up that iMac G4 photo:

This photo is from a set that I shot while attending the O’Reilly 2002 ETCon, which took place at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara. It was a little different from the previous year’s edition of the conference, what with everything being scaled down; even the name had been shortened from the original “Emerging Technologies Conference” down to “ETCon.”

(One of us — I don’t recall whom — engaged in a little gallows humor and quipped “Maybe we should call this the Receding Technologies Conference.”)

This was early 2002, when the dot-com bubble burst had grown into a full meltdown. A lot of us had lost our jobs when the companies we worked for had imploded, but most of us had saved enough to attend a couple of conferences, partly to look for our next gigs, and partly because we couldn’t not go and not see our friends and peers.

One of the nice things about this pared-down conference was that it felt a little more personal. There were more opportunities to just hang out as friends and enjoy some “down time” — or what passes for down time when you’re young and have programming skills, spare time, and lots of ideas — with each other.

The geekist lobby on Earth

We did a lot of hanging out in the hotel lobby, which was pretty much a gathering of a lot of Web 2.0 names you might remember from way-back-when, and some of whom are still working away these days.

This was an awesome “hallway track.”

Out for dinner and to see the new iMacs

A whole bunch of us decided to go into town for an unofficial dinner one evening, which included a run to the Apple Store to see the new iMac G4s. I took a cab with Zooko, Wes Felter, and Aaron Swartz.

I suppose I actually attended some conference sessions…

…the only evidence I have of that are these photos.

Attack of the House Party / Attack of the Clones

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones had just been released around the time of the conference, and a number of us decided to go catch the movie. It was decided that we’d pre-game at Quinn Norton’s and Danny O’Brien’s house. This worked well for Aaron, as it wasn’t an age-restricted event at a bar.

After hanging out at the house for a little bit, we made our way to the theatre. We somehow managed to get tickets despite the crowds and our late arrival.

We’d broken up into smaller groups, and Aaron was with me. There were very few seats left, but the front row was still free.

“Front row, then?” I asked Aaron, and he said “Sure.” We took a couple of seats on the left side.

There was still a fair bit of time to kill before the coming attractions came on, never mind the film.

“Dare you to play something,” Aaron said, pointing at my accordion.

“You are so on, young man,” I said. I stood up and played the Star Wars main theme and the Imperial March, getting the audience all riled up.

When the film started, I wanted to get a picture for my blog review. As I pulled out my camera, I said “Keep an eye out for ushers” as I snapped a picture of the opening crawl.

We both got a great laugh out of an all-caps line in the crawl, “CLONE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC,” and for the next few months, it became a catchphrase for us in IRC chats: “PEER-TO-PEER ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, “BOY BAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, “UNDERPANTS ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, and so on.

Final day

On the final day of ETCon, we ditched the lobby and went poolside…

It’s hard to believe it was that long ago.