Story via Macbreak Weekly [twt].

As with everything there are different levels of nerds.  On one hand you have the people who line up twenty minutes early so that they can get into an early showing of the latest comic book inspired movie like Iron Man; they’re the daytripping nerds.  Maybe they’ve named their dog after Albert Eienstein or made a Back To The Future reference in a blog post, they’re kind of dorky but you don’t need to be afraid of them.

Then there’s the people who not only continue to use a ten year old handheld computing platform, but self-maintain their devices and hold conferences for them.  That’s right, ten years ago Apple stopped selling the Newton and apart from a now confusing joke on The Simpsons about handwriting recognition software, there’s not a lot of evidence that it was ever around.

You know apart from the Alpha Geeks who cling to it because… well I suppose because it’s either that or buy somthing new.  And no, I doubt anyone is saving money by keeping their Newton at this point.  If anything running a Newton is probably more expensive than buying a newer PDA, and certainly attending a conference about it is not a cost saving maneuver.

That’s right next July Vancouver plays host to the WWNC: 2009, the Word Wide Newton Conference [wwnc] and they’re looking for speakers.  So if you’ve been Montgomery Scotting a Newton so that it stayed active, you’ve got a chance to meet your own kind, trade stories and run web serves together. 

Whatever it is you Alpha Nerds do.