-- .-. .-----. .---. ---------------------------------------------------- | |N | | | |Y | O |PINION : MY VIEW ON COMPUTERS AND THE FUTURE -- `-' `-'-'-' `---' ---------------------------------------------------- Revolution and Evolution at COMDEX/Canada '96 Gregory Lam August, 1996 IMO896.TXT ONCE AGAIN, one of the largest computer expos in the world pays Toronto a visit, and once again, I had decided to walk the aisles of the Metro Convention Centre and the playing field of SkyDome in order to catch a glimpse of what surprises are in store for the computer consumer in the months to come. COMDEX/Canada, the largest computer show in Canada, was held in downtown Toronto from Wednesday, July 10th to Friday the 12th and held over 600 booths, 60,000 attendees and an astonishing amount of cutting-edge software and hardware. In fact, COMDEX is actually three shows in one - COMDEX, WindowsWorld, and LANExpo. And at $50 a ticket, they mean business. I attended the show on Friday, and, despite this being my third annual pilgrimage, COMDEX never ceases to amaze me. First, some first impressions: The ID cards have new logos. And, for the second year, the WindowsWorld logo precedes the LANExpo one. Apparently, priorities have changed. In addition, the average age level of the attendees seems to have dropped ten years; once the haunt of middle-aged men clad in business suits, COMDEX seems to be full of teenagers like me and university students! Lastly, the 1996 Olympics theme was riding strong in the marketing tactics. As another sign of the times, system requirements and preferences have increased significantly. The preferred choice of machine was the Pentium-100 and the Pentium-120. The AST booth even flaunted a Pentium-166 and PentiumPro-180. Predictably, the only major exhibitor who used Macintoshes was Apple Canada. As for operating systems, the decision seemed to be split down the side; while Windows 95 was everywhere, I still saw a lot of computers running gold ol' Windows 3.1. The only exceptions were IBM, who used OS/2 Warp on half of their systems, and Apple. Windows NT: what's that? In the past, I have found these statistics to be a pretty good indicator of what the system requirements will be for the software coming this fall and Christmas. It should be noted that last year's "weapons of choice" were the 486 DX2-66 and the DX4/75. If COMDEX/Canada '95 was the Show of Multimedia, this year's expo was definitely the Show of the Internet, or specifically, that graphical and user-friendly Internet medium called the Worldwide Web. There were dozens of exhibits present, feeding on the current fad and frenzy to get online as well as extolling the virtues of the web as a dynamic and global way of doing business. By the way, as far as browser popularity goes, there were an equal amount of computers running Netscape 2.0 and MS Internet Explorer 2.0. Booths were bartering every Internet product and service conceivable. There were the big service providers such as America OnLine Canada(giving out free disks as usual) and CompuServe, as well as Canada's iSTAR outfit, whose exhibit sported a row of computers connected to ISDN lines for your surfing pleasure. IBM invited people to sit down in an Internet village of ThinkPads and Aptivas clustered around picnic tables and umbrellas and surf the IBM network on their OS/2 WebExplorer software, which just so happened to have IBM's Olympic website (http://www.atlanta.olympic.org) as homepages. Of course, I was a little mischievous, and I loaded my homepage (HoTaMaLe! at http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/4818/) on every hooked up computer I could find in the entire show, then went to IBM, telnetted to my favourite MUX and said hi ("Hey! I'm calling from COMDEX?" "What's that?"). I also later found out many of the workstations were loading the pages from their hard drives, giving the illusion of speed and ensuring people cannot meddle on the net at the same time. Surprisingly, I saw virtually no webpages which used frames or JavaScript. In my opinion, these web technologies seem great, however, few people can find truly practical uses for them. A particularly interesting booth I came across was CANOE: Canadian Online Explorer. CANOE (http://www.canoe.ca/) offers free daily news services across the WWW, from The Financial Post to 680 News, Toronto's AM news radiostation. Funded by Rogers Multimedia, this small, green booth featured background native rhythms and two Macintoshes logged on to the CANOE website. To wrap it up, the InContext booth was busy marketing their latest drag-and-drop webpage designer Spider. Being a HTML purist, I still think WYSIWYG editors are too cumbersome, and Spider's exorborant claims that "you'll never have to see HTML code ever again" seems quite improbable. Besides, who wants to program like that? Digital Corporation and many others held presentations on setting up intranets - local internal office networks using standard Internet and WWW protocols which can also be accessible from the Internet through security barriers called firewalls - as business advantages. There were still some vestiges of multimedia technology at COMDEX. There were some full motion video cards, digitizers and scanners. Play Incorporated was also pitching their wildly successful Snappy Video Snapshot, an inexpensive device which captures incredibly gorgeous images right off your television. Other vendors were selling colour printers. Hewlett-Packard's new LaserJet 5M does an okay job, with slightly fuzzy printouts similar to colour photos in 1970's magazines. Textronix's line of Phaser colour printers did an outstanding job. Of course, the prices range from $2,138 to $21,494, and print speeds are snail-like, moving at more than 2 minutes per page. 3M's printer spent over ten minutes on a single sheet, so I do not know how good that was. HP also showed off the economy personal printer 5P, which I still think looks like a lasagna maker. I also got to fiddle with some of the stranger pointing devices. One in particular was the GlidePoint, which was connected to a laptop playing a MPEG of "Goldfinger". The GlidePoint is a little square, where you can use your finger to drag objects onscreen, and double-click with two taps. Nice, however, your finger becomes quite itchy after a few minutes. I also got to try out the IBM TrackPoints again. TrackPoints are little red rubber pencil-eraser-like joysticks. At the IBM's Internet village, I did discover a startling fact: after extensive use, the TrackPoint started wearing down exactly like a well-used eraser head on a pencil. Finally, I trekked over to WindowsWorld, held at SkyDome. It's funny to see the dome from the perspective of the baseball player. The Microsoft booth now gives out product information only on CD-ROM. The CD contains the Windows95 service upgrade, a melee of Internet Explorer 1.0 NT through 3.0Beta for W95, Internet Assistants, and product information in the form of web pages. Aside from the Windows NT 4.0 Server operating system, Microsoft is only releasing games as new products. Apparently to complement Microsoft's new digital SideWinder joystick, they are releasing games such as the submarine warfaring "Deadly Tide", Fury3 (1995's 3-D spaceplane shoot-em-up) lookalike "HellRiser: Beyond Fury" and "Close Combat", a "Command and Conquer" clone whose soldiers can bravely fight as well as flee and desert depending on your orders. However, Ottawa-stationed Corel Corporation was not to be outdone. Excellent presentations, spotted with some pretty good jabs at Americans, highlighted the new Corel WordPerfect 7.0, which featured instant HTML conversion, intelligent programming (eg. graphing a table on Canadian populations will automatically bring up the map of Canada) and integration with other WordPerfect Suite products such as the Quattro Pro spreadsheet. Corel was also raffling dozens of packages, from WordPerfect 6.1 to the new Corel Web.Graphics webpage-making suite. Of course, the most important part of COMDEX are the freebies! Sadly, times are tough, and there wasn't much to go around. Aside from Adobe giving out CDs of demos of their desktop-publishing and graphics software and the odd vendor supplying candies, there was nothing. In conclusion, I must say it will be an interesting year in computing. Things will continually get faster, stronger and easy to use. I have only described a small percentage of what is in store for the future. COMDEX's next stops in Canada are COMDEX/SCIB '96 at Montreal from October 8-10, COMDEX/PacRim '97 in Vancouver from January 21-23, and COMDEX/Canada '97 returns to Toronto on July 9-11 next year. Hope to see you there. (C)opyright Gregory Lam, All rights reserved. You are allowed to copy this document sans charge on the condition none of it is altered or used without proper bibliographical references. === G R E G O R Y L A M =================================================== -=Toronto, Ontario=- {~._.~} ("*_*") gregory.lam@ablelink.org ___/|___\_______ ( Y ) ( v ) HoTaMaLe! http://www.geocities ( /-\_____\___/-\) ()~*~:()():~%~() .com/TimesSquare/4818/ ======\_/o--------\_/======(_)-(_)==(_)-(_)=================================