By Peter Kent
LAS VEGAS -- "One day at Comdex is enough to take away the will to live," a colleague told me on hearing that I planned to attend the world's largest computer show. His comment may be an exaggeration, but Comdex is certainly no vacation.
Sure, it's in Las Vegas, a sort of adult's Disneyland, so for some it provides an
excuse to blow some money, see Siegfried and Roy, and drink at all times of the day and night (and indulge in pleasures that can get you arrested in other states).
But if you're serious about benefiting from the show, you need to think of it as a military operation, one to be planned carefully.
For a start, you'd better bring comfortable footwear. You'll be on your feet hours each day. You've got miles of aisles to get through -- about 3,100 exhibitors worth. And if your feet (and back) give out? Then make your way to one of the massage stations or have orthotic shoe inserts fitted at the Alzner Orthotics booth.
You might want to bring a magnifying glass, too. Those 3,100 exhibitors are spread across 14 halls, pavilions and meeting-room areas. The show maps squeeze so much in that they are close to illegible. And before you even get near an exhibit hall, figure out which companies you just "hav" to see. Deal with them first, then wander around.
If you don't plan like this, you may reach the end of your stay without getting to the most important exhibitors.
Consider wearing earplugs. Las Vegas is a noisy place at the best of times; the clanging and chinking of the slot machines is constant. But within the Comdex halls you'll be blasted with a cacophony of multimedia, music from booth "shows" that seems to bear little or no relationship to the product being promoted, and people shouting company names in an effort to win T shirts
and other junk. ("When I say, Who makes this product?', you shout out 'Unisys!' The quickest person gets a CD holder!" It's amazing what you can get intelligent people to do for a freebie.)
So what's the big news at the show? The Internet, of course. Every product is an Internet product. If you sell computer monitors, you show how great the World Wide Web looks on your products, and if you sell CDS you make sure that you stocked up on Internet shareware disks.
The product that won the "Best of Show" prize was Web Compass, a great little program from Quarterdeck that explores the World Wide Web for you. It automatically searches selected Web search "engines," then goes to each page listed by the engines and grabs a paragraph or two of information to give you more of an idea of what each page actually contains. It will even automatically research periodically.
Another busy Internet booth was the Netscape booth. And why not? With Netscape hysteria pushing the price of Netscape s stock from an initial public offering of $28 this summer to well over $100 per share by the end of the show week (a price that bears little relation to the true value of the company), you'd expect that interest "on the ground" would be heavy.
In fact anything Web seemed to be popular; hardware to help you set up a Web site, programs to help you create Web pages, automate Web pages, jazz up Web pages.
Another interesting technology that was popping up all over the show -- one that may have the long-distance companies worried -- is the "Internet phone" system. These are programs that allow you to talk to other Internet users. Both you and your friend or colleague (who might be on the other side of the world), log onto the Internet and talk to each other using your computers' sound cards -- your voices are digitized and sent across the Internet.
The next major step for this technology seems to be the ability to make "non-Internet" calls. For instance, I might be able to log on to the Internet in Denver, connect to an Internet address in London, and have my "call" routed off the Internet and onto the public telephone system, allowing me to make international phone calls for $1.25 an hour! (Beat that, Sprint!)
Of course, you probably could learn all this by reading a few computer magazines. But there are advantages to visiting Comdex. Many people go to visit colleagues and clients. Half the computer geeks in the country seem to be there (more than 205,000 of them), along with a sizable contingent from the rest of the world. (Can you imagine the devastation to the world's computer
business should a higher power decide to punish Las Vegas for its excesses, with earthquake, fire, and plague?)
It's nice to be able to get your hands on products, too, and see what they really feel like. I'd seen the GlidePoint mouse replacement in print ads, but I was surprised at just how well it worked. I've also discovered that 3-D goggles are not ready for prime time; I was left squinting after wearing one pair. (Apart from that, I'm not shelling out $800 for what amounts to a toy.)
And I was impressed with Mind Point's Remote Control, which looks like a TV remote but lets you move your mouse pointer from 45 feet away and provides a variety of presentation features.
There's far more interesting stuff at Comdex than I possibly can fit into 900 words. And anyway, after a while everything at the show starts to blur. Once you've seen 30,000 Windows dialog boxes you've seen them all.
It's clear, however, that attractive young women dressed and moving like robots are in
vogue in the trade-show business, that short skirts and deep cleavages still sell (even to propellerheads), and that however good OS/2 may be, almost nobody is using it.
Peter Kent is a Colorado-based writer specializing in computers. He's the author of Using Microsoft Network (Que) and Using Netscape 2. Peter can be reached at geek@topfloor.com.
Copyright © 1995 Boulder County Business Report. All Rights Reserved.