iPad: taking computers back from us nerds

Hi, my name is Alex, and I'm a recovering nerd.

I'm hardly as hardcore as some I could name, but I've done my share of tinkering. Fiddling with config.sys on my 286 to free up enough of the 640kb base RAM so I could play Dune 2. Frying a videocard on my 486 (with a bit of stickytape over the inexplicable Turbo button) because even though I remembered to remove the power plug, I'd forgotten to remove the VGA cable. Marveling at the brilliance of a full-color SVGA screen running Windows 95, the hottest of hotnesses.

Now look at me! A dyed-in-the-wool Machead, who cherishes his iPhone above most other worldly possessions and who honestly thinks the iPad will be the bee's knees. I honestly consider the lack of user-replaceable components on my Macs a feature worth praising. I like the fact that iPhone doesn't have a common file store or Flash support despite the inconvenience it entails. Where did I go wrong? When did my Nerd Card expire?

The history of technology shows an epileptic vacillation between the extremes of complexity and simplicity, and between exclusivity and generality. Invent something, add more capabilities, grow frustrated, revise and simplify, add more capabilities to that. Buildings, tools, software. Provide a tool for specialists to multiply their capacity, reinvent and streamline it when it becomes popular among novices.

Where computers were once gritty, exciting diamonds in the rough that took a nerd's enterprising spirit to carve into a gem, they've become ubiquitous and indispensable tools. Modern man carries a tiny, 3G-capable computer in his pocket just as his ancestor carried a utility knife. Everyone needs them.

That computers are complex is an easy thing to admit, but the typical response is to simply shrug and accept it. Language and mathematics are complex and we still need to learn them -- and we'd be the poorer for it if we didn't. Those of us gifted with the experience and insight to understand how computers work well enough to get them to do almost everything we want, or at the very least intelligently compose a Google query to find the solution to our problem, like to think we're the majority and that anyone who doesn't understand computers is a sad throwback. We pity them, and when they're blood relatives, we tolerate them calling us at crazy hours to help them to figure out, once again, how to print a bloody photo.

There's a revolution coming, though, a new conflict between the Nerds and the Dummies, and I'm a staunch turncoat who stands by the principle of being on the winning side.

It started with iPhone, really, in the way that the Galactic Civil War really started with the election of Palpatine to the Senate, but now the iPad takes the throne of the Supreme Chancellor and, well, I hope this Star Wars reference indicates my nerdy pedigree before I turn my back on it.

The players in this battle? On one side, there's the computer users, the folks who know their way around a filesystem, who can install a program and know better than to call their browser 'my Internet'. In the red corner, cloaked in shadow and dusty with neglect, is that slobbering horde of Mongols that have been the bane of Nerdhood since time immemorial: humans.