Geeks bear gifts for the needy

Pocket protectors and taped-up eyeglasses were nowhere to be found. But there were bad haircuts and hard drives aplenty among the self-proclaimed geeks who gathered Saturday morning at Riverside High School to tinker with outmoded computers so they could be given to area children who have none.

The event was the fourth such "Geek-A-Thon" organized by the Durham-based nonprofit Kramden Institute. The institute refurbishes computers and turns them over to needy students, who treasure the big and boxy monitors and cases discarded by others.

The institute has given away more than 350 computers, and that number will increase by another hundred or more thanks to this weekend's session. The group hopes to give out about 1,000 computers this year.

The computers are distributed through the Durham school system to honor roll students who meet federal poverty standards. The group hopes to expand soon to include Wake County.

The project has come a long way from the operation that a father and son founded in their basement three years ago. It began almost as a fluke.

Mark Dibner had been browsing on eBay late one night and came across a motherboard -- the main circuit board that connects all the parts of a computer -- for a phenomenal price. He wasn't quite sure what a motherboard did, but he bought it anyway. The next day he told his son, Ned, that they were going to build their own computer.

It didn't bother either of them that they had no idea how. The duo downloaded a how-to-guide from the Internet, got the rest of the necessary parts and went to work.

Once the computer was built, Ned got an idea. He had noticed that many of his classmates at Brogden Middle School in Durham were getting points taken off their work because their assignments had to be typed and they didn't have computers at home.

"I thought that wasn't fair and that everybody should have the equal advantage," said Ned, 16. So he asked his father whether they could build computers for some of his fellow students.

"When a teenager says something like that, you listen," Dibner said.

He started to solicit castoffs from businesses and individuals. When computer parts took over the basement and dining room and started to bleed into the kitchen, Dibner thought maybe it was time to turn the project into a nonprofit with its own space.

Throughout the day Saturday, about 70 geeks of all stripes -- and sometimes with uncoordinated stripes -- hunched over the metallic skeletons of computer towers. They fidgeted with a mishmash of wires, plucked out green rectangles loaded with microchips and sorted through masses of cables and cords, all the while keeping up a constant murmur of techie talk. Stacks of monitors lined the walls of what is usually Riverside's ROTC room. Containers of memory sticks, motherboards, CD-ROMs and clunky keyboards crowded several tables.

"Uh oh," 11-year-old Jason Williams of Raleigh said to his father, DeWayne, as the screen on the computer he had been working on read "Boot failure." The boy with a fondness for gadgets stuck his head and hand into the computer and began rearranging a tangle of wires. A few minutes later, the computer booted right up. This was the second Geek-A-Thon for Jason and his dad, and they were shaving minutes off the time it took them to get a computer up and running.

Others, such as Chris Daye, a Riverside freshman, had not reached their full geek potential. Chris didn't know much about putting together computers. He had come mainly because someone told him the volunteer work would look good on his college applications. But an hour or so in, he was just as enthralled by the installation of an Ethernet card as anyone else.