Circus du COMDEX: The Running of the Geeks

By Todd Watson, IBM Corporation, Roanoke, Texas

Todd Watson, Personal Systems' sometimes "lite" writer, relates the saga of his trek to the mother of all computer shows, COMDEX.

Being a journalist who writes mainly about computers, technology, and other (not necessarily related) topics, I always figured going to COMDEX would be like making a peregrination into technology's innermost soul, a heavy trip into the Lost Wages desert night which I envisioned might likely be replete with glorious, life-changing visions about the cosmos, computers, and the purpose of my electron-centered existence in this universe. Barring that, I figured I'd at least take in a couple of good floor shows.

So when the opportunity arose for me to cover an IBM press conference (and do some general milling about on the show floor) at this past fall's mother of all trade shows, I jumped at the opportunity.

What the $*%&#! was I thinking?

First off, I feel as if I'm still waiting to go to COMDEX, and this despite the fact that, as I relate this saga, I've been back from there for three weeks now. My experience defies description, but as a caution to prospective, future desert travelers, I'll chance the possibility of PTCD (post traumatic COMDEX disorder) and make a valiant attempt at describing my experience there.

COMDEX is very similar to that Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, except that instead of waiting for a deity to arrive, at COMDEX one waits for everything else--bathrooms, telephones, buses from the hotel to the Lost Wages Convention Center, a table at that okay restaurant at Caesar's Palace, taxis, telephones, buses from the Lost Wages Convention Center back to the hotel, telephones, a Big Mac at (heaven forbid) the glitzy McDonalds on the strip, buses from the Lost Wages Convention Center over to the Sands Convention Center, TELEPHONES, TELEPHONES, TELEPHONES!!!

You get the picture.



My wait started as soon as I landed at the airport. It was late on a Sunday afternoon, and you would have figured everyone was at home watching football like normal patriotic Americans. Not on COMDEX Sunday Eve. The line to get a cab reminded me of those Russia-like bread queues I used to stand in for the Shock Wave roller coaster at Six Flags Over Texas--a feat, which I must tell you, I only put up with until the age of sixteen, when I discovered you could get the same sensation by slamming a six-pack of Shaefer's beer.

I considered going straight back inside the airport and entering the first bar I found so that I could watch football instead of standing in line, but decided to stick it out and make my way on over to the hotel.

So began "Fear and Loathing in Lost Wages, Part Deux."

The spirit of "coopetition" that has recently loomed like a dense fog over the computer industry had definitely migrated over the desertous wasteland of Lost Wages, for people from competing companies were actually sharing cab rides to their respective hotels. With the best fiscal interest of IBM in mind (and figuring I'd be better off using my corporate "Don't Leave Home Without It" card for something more important, like cash advances at the casino), I hooked up with a guy from Intel. As we cruised out of the airport at a whopping five miles an hour, he informed me that he was working on Intel's 960 embedded RISC microprocessor. Great, I thought, what's that?

When I told him I worked for IBM, he got a worried look on his face, like I was some reverse anthropomorphic version of the PowerPC chip who might bite off his head at any moment. In the true spirit of the day, I told him not to worry about our little friendly competition, that he should just "Get Warped," and that we would give him a job when Intel eventually became the Wang of microprocessors. (If only it had been a few weeks later, I could have wheedled him into pulling out his Pentium laptop to help calculate the tip.)

As we drove out of the airport, I saw that IBM had been kind enough to rent a gigantic DiamondVision screen so that I could catch the end of the Cowboys/49ers game. Then I realized that football was a lost cause, as the screen was informing all 190,000 computer geeks fleeing the airport that they were about to be warped beyond all warpings, and to fasten their seatbelts because, five miles per hour or not, this year's COMDEX was gonna be a wild ride.

A short while later, my heart began to pitter patter as the cab pulled up to that Eighth Wonder of the World, the Great Pyramid known as the Luxor Hotel. Hey, I had studied enough high school Egyptology to remember what happened to that King Tut dude in his pyramid, and I had no plans for getting dug up 2,000 years from now only to discover that Bill Gates had indeed successfully taken over the universe. But this was COMDEX, and beggars couldn't be choosers--I figured a pyramid was the next best thing to sleeping on a bench along Lost Wages Boulevard, even if I did have to stay in the same room as my manager.



I skeptically entered the large confines of the behemoth Giza structure and approached the check-in counter to inform the hotel personnel I was ready to be escorted to my tomb. Instead of giving me a key, they handed me a small magnetic card with Warp smeared all over it. Man, I thought to myself, is there anywhere we won't advertise this thing?

When I discovered I was staying on the 13th floor, I almost turned tail back to the airport--I'm not suspicious, just very cautious--but decided that superstition in Lost Wages was a cheap commodity. After circumnavigating the mile long hallways of the Luxor several times, I finally came to realize that pyramids have inclinators, not elevators, and soon was making my 45 degree ascent up to lucky number 13.

Upon entering my room, I immediately checked out the bathroom and was sorely disappointed to not find a Warp banner wrapped across the toilet seat. I walked over to look out the slanted windows and, after bumping my head on the angled surface, attempted to calculate how many bottles of Windex the housekeeping staff went through in a year to keep the Great Pyramid so sparkly clean. I didn't have my Pentium PDA handy, though, so after a meditative silence, I instead gasped in awe at Lost Wages' million points of light. I became so moved that I bowed down and began to pray to the gods of Mount Computus, for I knew that I had indeed arrived at the mecca of Technology.

Being the nomadic warrior that I am, I promptly set up shop on the fancy Luxor desk to check my e-mail. When I turned on the boob tube for a little background noise, I discovered COMDEX had its own TV channel. That's when I knew for sure that the show had gotten too big for its britches, although I hadn't yet traipsed across the actual show floor. Even IBM got rid of its own TV channel.

The next day I discovered that to get to the convention center, I had to amble across the street to the Excalibur Castle to catch the bus. When I walked around the corner to the bus stop, I discovered about 300 other COMDEXgoers who were also 1) too cheap to take a cab over to the convention center, or 2) couldn't find a cab to save their lives. Figuring IBM would want me to get the most for their money out of this experience, I went back to the Luxor in search of a cab.

I hooked up with a couple of other COMDEXers, and we were fortunate enough to catch a ride with a cab driver who, I'm sure, works for the Mafia in his spare time. He jovially related to us the story of an unfortunate gentleman who, one night not too long before, thought he was about to engage in one of the activities which only Nevada can provide on a legal basis (if you catch my drift) and instead woke up to discover he was missing a kidney! Lost Wages apparently has a booming black market for transplantable organs.

Although I desperately wanted to know how one wakes up after a drug-induced slumber and comes to the realization that a kidney is missing (a molar or an eye I could understand), I figured that Don Cabbie was not the person to ask; and anyway, I had business to attend to at the convention center. I can assure you, though, that for the rest of the trip, I kept my eyes peeled for beautiful women trying to conceal long syringes under their evening gowns.

Upon my arrival at the convention center, I immediately felt guilty for taking a cab (even though my share only cost IBM $3). It seemed that instead of renting a huge convention hall, IBM, Apple, and Motorola had pooled their money to pitch a big tent outside the convention hall. They called it the PowerPC Pavilion, but they couldn't fool me--I know a tent when I see one.

Figuring that we would be serving Warp dogs and Budweiser, I entered the tent thinking how great it was that I would be saving loads of money on my expense account, only to discover there was no food or beer inside--just microprocessors. Since I've never been a silicon fan, I decided I would hold off on eating computer chips until I was ravenous enough to start seeing mirages.

Although I work for IBM, I had obtained a media badge in order to score a free lunch in the IBM-sponsored press room and have people think I was a very important person (which, of course, I'm not). This meant I could not enter the show floor until the magic hour of 10:00 a.m. arrived. So I stood amidst the technohungry masses and began to panic, figuring I was about to experience something akin to the Oklahoma Land Rush.

Boy, was I right.



The Annual Running of the Geeks in Lost Wages makes Pamplona's bull sprint seem like a flea rodeo. Even Hemingway would have sat this one out. Ten a.m. struck, and you would have thought IBM was handing out ThinkPad 755CDs (which, by the way, won The Interface Group's and Byte Magazine's Best of COMDEX) to the first 10,000 people who made it to the other end of the show hall a couple of miles away. To keep from getting wingtipped to death, I quickly took refuge in what turned out to be the WhenDoze 95 SWAT Team headquarters.

At first not realizing I was in enemy territory, but being the cognizant dude that I am, I immediately tuned in to the whispers about Microsoft providing its customers "early experiences" with WhenDoze 95. Virtually scratching my head in an attempt to decipher their codespeak, I wondered if having an "early experience" was something akin to learning how to tie one's shoes, then finally realized what they meant to say was beta. (Why use the right word when an obscure one will do?)

When I discovered they were charging people $30 a pop to help THEM get the bugs out of THEIR betaware, I knew we were in for a good battle. How could a gargantuan company like Microsoft have the gall to charge its customers thirty big bucks for such a tiny little operating system, and a beta version to boot (or, perhaps, not boot)? That is the question.

I suspected it must have had something to do with Bill Gates' recent purchase of Leonardo da Vinci's ancient sea scroll, the Hammer Codex, for a few million dineros. When I caught wind that Billy Bob Gates was hangin' around the IBM booth, checking out the totally awesome (pardon the Valleyspeak, but it was, in a word, awesome) OS/2 Warp demo, I considered telling him that looking for a solution to Microsoft's difficulties with WhenDoze 9? in a Leonardo da Vinci parchment was like using a Pentium computer to calculate pi out to 25 digits--try though they might, they just weren't going to come up with the right answer. (As they said on the Net, "Intel Inside, Doesn't Divide.")

But enough industry parlance. It's pointless to argue with a few hundred mental marketing reps, and Billy Bob was too busy planning his Napoleonic takeover of business as it is known in the Western Hemisphere to concern himself with minor technical details. So like a good little IBM foot soldier, I escaped the horrific confines of the Microsoft encampment and made my way into the sanctum sanctorum of IBM's Warp Room, where prospective Warpees were test driving the latest, and seriously greatest, version of IBM's premier desktop Wizard of OS.

No longer prisoners of time, trapped behind windows of memory-limited despair and eternally suspended hourglasses, I was almost moved to tears as all those test drivers' eyes glazed over with the possible revelations and permutations that computing in a timeless expansion of unlimited Warpdom might bring to their computer-ridden lives. Poor things. Like me, they had come to the desert in search of visions, but had gotten Warped instead.

Which, in the end, was probably just as well. Visions are highly overrated--if Lou Gerstner didn't need one, why in the world did I?

Deciding I'd had enough of COMDEX for one lifetime, I made my way out of the convention center and into the serpentine line leading to Bus Route # 2 for the long trek back to the Great Pyramid. Kidneys still intact, mind mildly expanded, and nerves greatly overwrought, I reflected on the great wise words of that 19th century French poet, Paul Valery:

"The trouble of our times is that the future is not what it used to be."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

So I propose a toast: Here's to yesterday, because you never know--in the wild and wacky business of computing, tomorrow may never come.