1999 COMDEX SHOW A FLOP
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LAS VEGAS: The fall 1999 Comdex was, as always, a bit disappointing. The star of
the show was clearly the Yamagazi RoomTemp CryoModem I'm using to trasmit this
story. Yamagazi claims it blitzes out data faster than the speed of light, which
means that this report may have made it back to the office before the show even
took place.
 
This year, the computer industry's companion show -Legaldex- nearly outdrew the
hardware and software exhibits. With so many pending lawsuits and so much money
at stake, it's really no surprise that Legaldex sprawled into 11 hotel lobbies,
two parking lots, and a hallway at the Liberace museum. the Apple booths alone
commanded more than 30,000 square feet of space.
 
In what has turned out to be an annual tradition, IBM once again trotted out a
new graphics standard, the 3DGA. Compatible with the MGA, MCGA, HGA, EGA, VGA,
EVGA, QGA, VVGA, VHGA, VQGA, VMGA, VAGA, EAGA, GAGA and, of course, CGA boards,
this new standard heralds a "bold new era of channel proitabiltity," according
to IBM president and owner Shiek Akmar Mumani: "Now at last serious business
users can have their fancy 3-D graphs float in space."
 
Big blue also displayed yet another new keyboard. The 143-key sports 6 randomly
scattered Ctrl keys, three more function keys, and an entire pad of SysRq keys
(though IBM did not annouce why anyone needs even one). To counter IBM's new Blu
architecture, AST/Quadram/Hyundai announced Blubus-Plus, with an additional data
line and slightly more shielding. Blubus throws off so much RF interference that
airborne users can make their planes bank left and right by leaning on the
cursor arrow keys.
 
The fastest selling product at the show was IBM's just-released TBR (Technical
Bus Reference) manual, a fat compendium of IBM BIOS and chip-level errors that
the industry has had to accept as standards.
 
In response to the new line of IBM 240MHz machines, Campaq/Dell announced a
242MHz screamer, which it claims "makes the IBM box look like it's playing dead"
At the other end of the spectrum, we counted 35 manufacturers still selling
replacment motherboards for the original PC-1, switchable between 4.77MHz and
180MHz.
 
Sponsors of next year's millennial Comdex are planning to call Comdex 2000
"Finally, the year of the LAN." Other vendors are proposing that Comdex 2000 be
dubbed "The Year of the Home Application," in an effort to prod the industry
into producing at least one product that could justify buying a computer for
home use.
 
Ever-youthful Bill Gate's keynote address, "OS/9: The One You've Really, Really
Been Waiting For," blunted criticism that this newest version was still too hard
to use, too slow, and too memory-hungry: "Even though no third-party vendors
have taken taken advantage of the advanced capabilities of the seven previous
editions, dozens of developer are porting their applications over. And it will
run just fine on any system with 30 megabytes of RAM, although you may need a
bit more for your data."
 
In the word processing arena, MicroPro, Microsoft, and WordPerfect have packed
even more features into their bloated programs. MicroPro has purchased so many
third-party utilities that WordStar Professional Classic 7.3 is now delivered on
73 disks. WordPerfect has streamlined its 16-volume manual.
 
Finally, Lotus announced its 1-2-3 WZ 50-dimension spreadsheet, a "quantum leap"
above its previous 1-2-3 VZ 5th-dimension version. Although users have been
demanding this added power, say market analysts, they're still not sure what to
do with more that three dimensions. When pressed for a delivery date, Lotus
officials would only say "Sometime in the first quarter of the coming millennium
We can hardly wait.