A FRIEND OF MINE who worked for Digital Equipment Corporation for over a decade, and whose prized industry t-shirt was from the Windows 3.1 Developers Conference told me, back in the early 1990s: "You can't understand the computer industry unless you've been to been to Comdex and paged through an entire issue of Computer Shopper." This was back when Shopper was as thick as a small phone book.

For those of us who only started going to Comdex within the past decade or so, it's easy to lose track that Comdex - like even Microsoft, American Online, and the Web - had a modest beginning.

For example, the first Comdex show, in 1979, had 160 exhibitors and 4,000 attendees. according to "The Commerce of Commerce," Smart Business, November 2000. ( Here).

One person who's attended every Comdex in Las Vegas, and all but one of the Comdex/Spring shows, is computer columnist, science and science fiction writer Jerry E. Pournelle (Web site: www.jerrypournelle.com).

"To the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person who has attended every Comdex," Jerry said, commenting on the recent announcement that the 2004 Comdex/Fall show had been cancelled.

And as anybody who knows Jerry would expect, he's got a few stories to tell. (Note: These come from phone interviews and a Byte.com radio segment I did with him a few years ago.)

DPD: What were the first Comdex shows like?
JEP: The first Comdex was in the exhibition hall at Bally's. It was a pretty small affair and we saw it all in a day. The S-100 Bus and CP/M were still important, and the West Coast Computer Faire was a bigger and more important show.

The next year Comdex was larger and was already recognized as an important show for introducing new technology and announcing new products. By the third year it had become the most important show in the industry.

The second Comdex got to the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The show was already dramatically larger, more than three times as large.

And by the time they got to the third or fourth year, they had to build the West Hall, Comdex paid for an extension to the Las Vegas Convention Center. And it kept getting bigger and bigger.

DPD: So how did Bill Gates get his start at Comdex?
JEP: Early on, Peter Young, the event's Communications Director, got this young kid named Bill Gates, whose father actually [manipulated] the VueGraph machine, to be a keynote speaker early on. [Comdex founder] Sheldon Adelson didn't really know who he was. But just about then there was the big national magazine cover story in Time on Gates, so Sheldon was suddenly proud of having Gates as a speaker.

DPD: Who were some of the people you've met at Comdex over the years?
JEP: I have met everybody. Let me give you some anecdotes in place of that.

Somewhere in the mid-80s, John Dvorak suggested to William Randolph Hearst III that they ought to throw a journalists party at Comdex. Hearst told Dvorak, "Nobody will come if you invite them." John called me and said, "Let's co sponsor a party because Will will pay for it." We did, and it became for a while THE event at Comdex.

I remember at one of them, Bill Gates and three other CEOs shouting at each other on the balcony of the Sands Hotel to a point where my wife [Roberta Pournelle] actually thought one of them was going to throw the other off of the balcony.

We had some pretty memorable ones. That was the one, I believe, that just as the party was beginning to wind down a little, Phillippe Kahn showed up and bought twenty cases of champagne on his credit card, just to get the party going again.

That was the party you could get to if you could find it.

DPD: What's the most unusual exhibit you've seen?
JEP: One of the most impressive in the sense of memorable was when Computer Associates brought a seven million dollar yacht into the Convention Center, and used it as the centerpiece of a big display. I don't remember a thing about what they were selling, or what it was they were promoting, but you sure remember that yacht.

DPD: What about Byte, Comdex and you?
JEP: One Comdex the Byte booth featured the Byte editors. There was me and editor-in-chief Phil Lemmons and some others, just sitting in chairs, people would come up and ask questions... we once had a crowd of about a thousand people standing around just to ask us questions. Those were the days when there was a lot of enthusiasm on the part of computer users.... they were just beginning to let users into Comdex in those days.

DPD: What are some of the ways that Comdex has changed over the years?
JEP: It's gotten so big that it's hard to follow the key events.

It used to be you could have a symposium, e.g. Byte magazine sponsored an operating system shoot out, we had Microsoft, Novell and Sun ... all the various people involved in OSs on a two hour panel. I was one of the moderators. We just literally tried to go through where they thought they were going. The room was overflowing with people. I don't see things like that at Comdex anymore, I wish I did. The old West Coast Computer Fairs, which Comdex pretty well killed, bought them, those used to have an excitement and a sort of get-together we don't have anymore.

DPD: Is anything helping preserve some of the aspects of Comdex you value?
JEP: The various small shows, like the [press-only] events like Steve Leon and Dan Janal's Technopolis/Showstoppers, the Silcon Northwest one being handled this year by J.P. Davis, and of course Lunch@Piero's These all complement Comdex.. and wouldn't be possible without Comdex.

These events have become extremely important to the press, it gives us a chance to talk to the developers. That's what I mostly miss about Comdex, it is increasingly large enough and busy enough that it is hard to have long conversations with the people who are actually making it happen.

Microsoft still brings some of their project managers and programmers to Comdex, but it's getting harder to get at them talk to them in any depth. I miss that. On the other hand there's all that glitter and there is all that stuff to see. µ

( Daniel P. Dern is a free-lance technology writer. Most recently he was Executive Editor of Byte.com. His web site is www.dern.com.)