There are precious few places in Nashville where like-minded computer geeks can congregate. Around here, the best places for “geek-to-geek” tend to be university computer labs, but unless you’re currently enrolled at an institution of higher learning, those may be off-limits. Coffee shops, restaurants and public parks would be promising—if they only had computers.
So when discriminating geeks want to shoot the breeze with each other, they tend to seek out a place where they can be surrounded by the tools of the trade. In truth, there’s only one such place in Nashville, and you won’t find a geek worth his salt who doesn’t know about it. Surrounded by diodes, tubes and silicon, it’s a small piece of digital nirvana called Javanco.
The building itself, located at 501 12th Ave. S., is quite unassuming. The front display window, long covered up with a piece of blue canvas, gives little clue to the store’s purpose. A weathered satellite dish perched atop a leaky roof proclaims a name and phone number, but nothing else. There’s really only one thing that might tip you off to the store’s popularity, and that’s in the parking lot around back: the rows of cars parked haphazardly on the rough gravel.
Inside, however, is both a geek’s dream and a technophobe’s worst nightmare. Stacks of PCs and electronic parts line the entryway. Thousands of small cardboard boxes line the shelves, filled with everything from batteries to capacitors to power supplies. Tables along the back wall, labeled “Blowout Zone,” contain blown-out monitors, hard drives and computers. Some may call it junk, but a true geek thinks of it as ambrosia for the soul.
Javanco, an electronic parts surplus house, has been around in some form since the mid-’50s. Photos on the wall near the door show the smiling faces of geeks long past, participants in the store’s annual yard sales. There are people who can even remember when Javanco did its first “reorganization” by moving piles of junk formerly in the back directly to the front. Nothing really ever changes at Javanco—it just tends to move around a lot. The store has kept up with the times, though; it has its own Web page at http://www.javanco.com/ . And that, it seems, is where the store’s recent trouble began.
A few weeks ago, a letter arrived at Javanco via certified mail. The letter was from Sun Microsystems, known for the specialized programming language called Java that has been widely adopted by such industry heavyweights as Apple, Microsoft and Netscape. Javanco, the letter claimed, had erred when it registered as “javanco.com” on the Internet. Javanco, it says, is a pending trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.
The Scene has obtained a copy of the letter. “It has come to Sun’s attention that your company is doing business under the name JAVANCO, and has registered the domain name ‘javanco.com’ for use in connection with your World Wide Web site,” the missive reads. “Each of these uses of the JAVA trademarks is likely to cause confusion with Sun’s family of JAVA-based marks.
“Therefore, we ask that your company promptly cease use of the...domain name and promptly change its name from JAVANCO.”
Javanco’s owners were shocked. The company, in existence long before Java was even a concept being discussed in the Sun Microsystems boardroom, was named after its owner, Javan Keith. For his part, Keith is not so much angry as he is amused. “I’ll tell you,” he says, “they sure walk around with big balls. We’re small-fry, leave us alone!”
It’s not known whether Sun Microsystems is aware of the fact Javanco is not really a trademark threat. Because of the holiday weekend, representatives of Sun could not be reached by the Scene for comment. If an action is taken, Javanco’s management says it intends to fight. If the battle takes place, you can be sure there will be hundreds of Nashville geeks on the sidelines to watch.
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♦ Another ITEC convention has come and gone, but it’s definitely one for the books. A record number of local Internet service providers were present, all of whom reported high levels of interest during the show. Nashville-based Telalink certainly wins the prize for flashiest show-floor gimmick. While other providers had respectable displays, Telalink quite literally moved a mountain. Show attendees were invited to scale a huge wooden wall covered with handholds while bundled in mountain-climbing gear. Surprisingly, many a businessman in wool sport coat and patent leather shoes tackled the monolithic display.
Other notables on the show floor: EdgeNet Media (formerly Edge Internet Services) demonstrating the Nashville Meeting Planner CD-ROM; ISDN-net giving tours of a Silicon Graphics machine; Inacom giving glimpses of Apple’s shiny new server product; and NetAware, a Web publishing company with a huge surfboard, pill bottles full of M&M’s, and spandex-clad salespeople.
♦ Don’t forget to visit the Summer Lights Web site before you visit the festival this year. The official site (http://www.summerlights.com/), hosted by ISDN-net, is packed with schedules and bios. This is the second year that the downtown street party has had its own Web site.
Joel Moses can be reached at joel@moses.com.
