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Originally Posted by Hitch
Comdex was fun.
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Zoos can be fun. Exhausting, but fun.
At one trade show in NYC I attended, a vendor (and I don't recall which), decided "Amazing Grace" played on bagpipes was a good promotional gimmick, and would periodically set it off, played
way too loud, to announce their next dog and pony show. At another, I spent an enjoyable half hour or so chatting with a magician another vendor had hired to do prestidigitation. He described the gig as Industrial Theater, and had an agent who had secured it for him. He did a good show and I was happy he had the work, but was a little bemused about
where he was hired to perform.
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I was working (I wish I could remember it all better). At the time, I was putting Basic 4 minis into hotels, in L.A. Comdex just seemed like it would go on forever. New amazing things and OSes and whatever all every year, y'know? But lo...new and amazing things, and all that, are fewer and further apart on the ground than we thought that they would be.
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A former girlfriend's father worked for Basic 4, and described the fun of staying one jump ahead of customers to be able to sell systems.
I assume the hotels were using them for reservations?
(Another hobby here is helping to plan and run literary SF conventions, and I'm usually the guy who deals with the venue on behalf of the con. Reservations are one of the things I have to keep an eye on, with lots of communication with attendees about "Don't try to make this special request through central reservations for the chain. They won't have a clue. Drop me a note and I'll see the property accommodates you." Just did one for an observant Jewish couple who wanted a low floor so they wouldn't be climbing lots of stairs on Shabbos. Easily done, once I know it needs to be. At last year's event, a Jewish couple complained about trying to get that through central reservations and failing. "Don't even try. That will fail. Contact me...")
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Although...even so, the things and gadgets and capabilities that we have today would have been considered George Jetson fluff and nonsense back then. Hell, the big "advanced" (ha!) removable drives that the Basic 4 had then were like, half the damn size of my body. Well, okay--half the size of my torso, and I'm not a wee petite thing. Now I store more than that on thumbdrives. :-) A LOT more.
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At the bank I once worked for in the 80's, the Small Systems Manager responsible for the multi-user boxes that
weren't mainframes (DEC PDP-11s, in his case) pointed at a row of removable media drives, and said "I've got a gig of storage!" There were three drives, each the size of a small refrigerator, and cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece.
I got a 32GB microSD card for the new tablet I'm configuring, and it cost a whopping $8.
For that matter, I still have my ancient PC clone running MSDOS 5 on a shelf. It has a 10
mhz NEC V20 CPU, 640 KB of RAM, a megabyte of expansion RAM on a card, a Hercules graphics card driving a mono monitor, and two 20[b]MB[/i] Seagate ST-225 hard drives. My Palm TX PDA has 128MB NVRAM, 4GB of storage in an SD card, and a 312mhx Intel PXA CPU.
Everything gets smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper. Alas, users don't get smarter...
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Dennis