Forget thick glasses, pocket protectors and lousy social skills. Today's nerd, says Adam Elman, is more chic than geek. And Elman should know: in March he was named "Nerd for the New Millennium" after acing a 20-question quiz at San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation.
"I still think of 'nerd' as pejorative," says Elman, '94, MS '96, who admits to some embarrassment at being stuck with the moniker through 2999. "But I don't think of it as a title so much as that I'm a prototype for the nerd of the 21st century."
Elman is well-versed in the trivia of 20th-century geekdom. Among the quiz questions he faced in the contest sponsored by website SiliconValley.com:
•Which company fostered the development of UNIX? (AT&T.)
•What are the five colors of Apple's new iMac? (Strawberry, lime, blueberry, tangerine and grape.)
•What IBM RDBMS runs on NT, UNIX and IBM mainframes? (Everybody knows that: DB2.)
He credits a Stanford class on computer history for teaching him some of the answers.
Elman still possesses some old-fashioned nerd credentials: he has two degrees in computer science, works as a software programmer for Stanford's Internet publishing project, Highwire Press, and has owned 10 computers since he got his first machine (a Commodore VIC-20) at age 9.
But there's more to Elman than machine code and databases. He still plays trumpet in the Stanford Band. He's also a member of Sinister Dexter, a swing, funk and blues combo that does gigs around campus. In fact, he plans to use the $1,000 he won in the contest to buy a device that can make CD recordings of his band. It doesn't get much cooler than that.
