The Show Goes On

By Jerry Pournelle

December 16, 2002

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Column 269

The new machine this month is Esperanza, an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ on an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard; this uses the nVIDIA nForce2 chipset. Esperanza has an ATI RADEON 9000 Pro video board and Corsair PC3200 memory. Full report later: The machine is stable, quite fast, and depending on what you want it for, it's aggressively cost-effective. Details later.

The End of COMDEX as We Know It

That was the title of Mark Eppley's LapLink COMDEX party. LapLink is the sane way to connect to your PC from a distance. LapLink Founder Mark Eppley used to be known for his huge COMDEX "Burnout" parties, generally held on Thursday night; people stayed through Thursday in those days. This year his party was on Tuesday night, and there wasn't much competition. COMDEX veterans will remember that Tuesday used to be the busiest night of COMDEX, with Silicon NorthWest competing with a dozen other large parties and receptions. In those days getting through Tuesday evenings required planning.

Tuesday was also the night of the Pournelle/Dvorak Party hosted by Will Hearst: This was the event you could attend if you could find it. Many tried. I remember one year things got out of hand, and John arranged for a fake party as a decoy while we sneaked away to another location for the real thing. When BYTE began giving the official "Best of COMDEX" show awards I was always busy on Tuesdays, so I couldn't go to my own party any longer. Meanwhile Will Hearst lost interest, and Dvorak arranged for another party hosted by his publisher. The Pournelle/Dvorak events ran for about five years, though, and were the best COMDEX parties ever. I recall one night Bill Gates and Paul Mace got into an argument that grew so heated my wife was afraid one might throw the other off the Sands tower.

This year, COMDEX was tiny. In the past the show would always spill over from the Los Vegas Convention Center into the Hilton, and a great deal of COMDEX was on two floors of the Sands Exposition Center, with major games and multi-media upstairs, and residuals down below.

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