© 1995 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 17, no. 5, September-October 1995, pp. 5-9.
Sandwiched between the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the 50th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, and spiced in mid-conference by the death of the leader of the Grateful Dead, there was Mac World Boston 1995. Oh, yeah, I think Microsoft was supposed to introduce some kind of new Mac-like program at the end of the month, too.
In the beginning
If you ever attend a Mac World, you should go a day early or plan on staying to the very end, and spend some time as a user group volunteer. This allows you to get into the exhibition halls before they open and stay after they close, which provides some interesting entertainment.
The setup process is incredible: over a period of just a few hours, a huge, empty area with a concrete floor, looking like a multi-acre warehouse (but cleaner and with better lighting), is transformed with miles of carpeting, miles of drapery, miles of electrical cable and networking cable, and tons of brightly-colored, custom-designed sets into a high-tech village market, soon to be invaded by 50,000 peasants. During setup, several hundred different teams set up booths entirely independently of one another, yet each dependent on the same needs:
“Do you have some tape I could borrow?”
“Could I buy a can of soda off you? I’ll give you five bucks.”
“Have you seen a large crate, about the size of a station wagon, with our name on it?”
“Do you have power and telephone service to your booth yet?”
“This looks upside down. Anyone know where the directions are on how to put this together?”
“What do you mean, we forgot to ship the software? We’re a software company!”
“Anyone know where we can rent a PowerBook in a hurry?”
“It’s on ‘the other hard disk?’ We only have one hard disk.”
“You don’t think the drop onto the concrete hurt it, do you?”
At the end of the expo, the teardown process is every bit as interesting. Hundreds of teams attempt to dismantle and pack up the booths, leftover handouts and whatnot as quickly as possible, intent on catching planes, or heading out to an end-of-expo party, or merely heading to bed, dead tired. They soon discover “the Marine Corps truth:” a dismantled booth never seems to fit in the same case it arrived in. They also discover brochures and demo disks they meant to hand out but couldn’t find earlier. One exhibitor this year found a $15,000 Mac that they’d already reported to the Boston police as stolen. The sacking of Rome was probably better organized.
Techno Peasants
As mentioned earlier, it helps to think of Mac World Expo as a village. MacWorld peasants are better educated than the average peasant, with far greater average incomes than the average peasant, but just like more common peasants they are intent on looking for freebies and samples. Along with “oohs” and “ahs” at the magic tricks, there is much thumping of melons, kicking of tires, and an amazing amount of bluffing: the merchants claim their wares are the best in the world, the peasants claim to be not mere peasants, but members of the nobility, worthy of exceptional discounts.
It is, however, a warped sort of village. There are no farmers, and no housing (though you occasionally would find either a merchant or a peasant curled up, trying to take a nap). Food is sold at premium prices ($1.75 for a can of Coke) by the exhibition hall to both merchants and peasants, and both groups complain bitterly about getting gouged. Next to freebies and bargains, chairs are the most sought-after item: virtually all the demos are attended not by eager buyers interested in what the merchants had to say, but by weary peasants tired of walking up and down miles of aisles. Merchants often attend each other’s demos just so they can sit down.
There is also a severe dial tone drought. Merchants attempting to use their credit card scanners, or fax modems, or modems were constantly fighting busy signals. Both merchants and peasants spent long hours wandering outside the exhibition halls, cellular phones clamped to their ears, attempting to get an open line. The desperate took to riding the shuttle buses running between the two expo sites, hoping to find a free cell somewhere along the way.
[The dial tone drought extended to hotels. Each night, I had to wait until about 2 a.m. to call into my office and collect E-mail; the hotel phones were jammed by all the guests trying to dial out with their PowerBooks. This, incidentally, really ticked off the hotel staff: they thought it was all some giant prank, apparently not realizing that a hotel full Mac World visitors means a hotel filled with incredible telecommunications power.]
If you’ve read any fairy tales, you’ll know that any self-respecting village is menaced by some awesome threat. At Mac World, the threat was variously described as Apple Computer, Microsoft, the U.S. Congress, or Mitch Hall Associates, which manages MacWorld Expo. The “Latino/American Computer Association, J. Toro, Director,” was passing out leaflets claiming that “Hackworld” itself was the menace:
Beware of a renegade program known as “Signature” that was crafted by the owner of the Bayside, a.k.a. “The Hack,” that has mutated into a dangerous virus that has attacked Latinos. This virus is a threat to employee programs, such as Health Insurance, Pension Plans, wage rates and other benefits. If the “Signature”program is left unpurged, this virus could spread throughout cyberspace.
Attempts to reach Mr. or Ms. Toro (Spanish for “bull”) for clarification were unsuccessful.
Techno Evangelists
Mac World Boston 1995 saw the return of two Macintosh legends with radically different styles. Charlie Jackson, founder of the San Diego Macintosh User Group and, later, Silicon Beach Software, has emerged from retirement. Just a couple years after selling Silicon Beach to Aldus for a tidy profit, his new venture, Future Wave Software, is marketing Smart Sketch, an inexpensive and clever graphics program that has received highly flattering reviews. Charlie, just as focused as ever, did his best to convince everyone that his new company was the center of the universe, deflecting all comments and questions about himself.
Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s most famous software evangelist, and freshly anointed as an Apple Fellow, did his best to convince everyone he was the center of the universe, a legend in his own mind, etc. His presentation on Claris E-mailer in the Claris booth was an excellent overview of what looks like a killer E-mail package. But it was also pure Kawasaki, with frequent references to himself, to his books, to his biases. One fan, sitting beside me, told his companion, “This is Guy. He’s special. You’ll like him.” After the presentation his companion asked, “Why?”
While the legends drew crowds inside, out on the lawn a lone Power Book user sat on the grass, a sign beside him advertising his goodie: solar panels for PowerBooks. KISS (Keep It Simple Systems) offers an environmentally friendly power source for an environmentally friendly computer, even though you might risk skin cancer if you use it as designed. The vendor’s body language seemed to discourage crowds; a mass of bodies blocks the sunlight.
Drawing a crowd
How do you attract a crowd?
- Invite Charlie Jackson or Guy Kawasaki to do your demo.
- Give away a CD-ROM disc. Diskettes are dead. Even without trying, I collected 19 different CDROM demos, just 9 diskette demos, and managed to avoid all but one free T-shirt.
- Be part of Apple’s Developer exhibit. This area is usually a little too exotic for most MacWorld visitors, but this time the area was packed. Most of the visitors had no idea what they were seeing, but they were eager to see it, anyway. “Why do I have to know how to program to use a debugger?”
- Do something involving the Internet. Star Nine, for years a quiet little developer of gateways for other people’s E-mail systems, was mobbed at their booth and at presentations they held during the expo. Their two “star” products, WebSTAR and ListSTAR, allow you to take a mild-mannered Mac connected to the Internet and tum it into a world-class World Wide Web site or Internet listserver. Most visitors had no idea what a Web site might be, or what the Internet was, but they mobbed Star Nine, anyway.
- Scan in text. IRIS, a Belgian company, borrowed one small corner of another company’s booth and managed to suck up all the attention with their DataPen, a wand that you slide over printed material, one line at a time. Via some slick software, the graphic image is converted into editable text on the screen, quite useful for capturing small articles, business cards and such. Last year, Visioneer attracted attention with prototypes of their PaperPort, a small scanner that sucks up a page of
paper and, in six seconds, turns it into an image on the screen. This year, the finished product attracted even larger crowds. The printed word is not dead. - Sell books. IDG, Academic Press and some other publishers all had good crowds, but the Peachpit Press booth was a major traffic hazard, blocking aisles in all directions. To repeat, the printed word is not dead.
- Make maps. Route 66, a nice highway route planner by a Dutch company, was a definite hit; people were buying multiple copies. I noticed that their display literature featured a photo of a paper map with felt-tipped highlighting running from Kingman, Arizona to Oklahoma City along U.S. 66. “Does the F.B.I. know about this?” I asked one guy in the booth. “It could be a critical piece of evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing; the suspects traveled this very route!” He gave me a very pale, worried look, obviously wondering: “How do I make this guy go away?”
- Run MS-DOS and Windows on a Mac. While Orange Micro never raised much of a crowd, Reply Corp. had constant traffic in their booth, attracted by their line of DOS on Mac cards. Insignia, with their much less expensive SoftWindows 2.0 package, had huge crowds. Most of these visitors seemed to know absolutely nothing about MS-DOS or Windows; they were looking only because a) a Mac could do it, so why not? and b) “somebody at the office said I should.”
- Run UNIX on a Macintosh. Tenon Intersystems demonstrated MachTen 4.0, a PowerPC native version of BSD 4.4 UNIX that is a) POSIX and FIPS compliant and b) runs on top of MacOS, allowing you to do Mac and UNIX things at the same time. MachTen was demonstrated at two different locations, but neither was willing to humor me by running MacOS, Windows 3.1 and UNIX at the same time (though they admitted this was easy to
do, if you had enough memory). - Run
NovellNetWare 4.1 on a Power Mac. Admittedly, this is an acquired taste, but to see NetWare blazing along on a Power Mac 8100, at speeds several times above those of an Intel-based server, is a trip. - Sell Iomega Zip or Jaz removable drives. Syquest had huge banners outside the expo halls, passed out tons of literature, and did everything they could to convince the world that they were the once and future leaders of the removable storage market – but their booth was deserted. !omega’s booth was packed, and every vendor selling Zip drives wore a smile. About the only sad faces in the Iomega booth were those souls disappointed with the news that the new 1 gigabyte Jaz drives wouldn’t be available until December.
- Sell furniture. Green Design Furniture Co. had some outstanding natural wood computer furniture that was strongly built, featured no nails or screws, and could be disassembled without tools. BackSaver came to the show expecting to sell tons of their inexpensive, ergonomic ErgoTech task
chair, and instead sold tons of their far more expensive leather-clad Executive BackChair. The Executive BackChair, in addition to being very, very comfortable, also got a boost on TV: Judge Lance Ito sits in one every day. - Sell Macintosh clones. The Radius 81I110 was definitely peppier than the average Mac, but not exceptional. DayStar’s Genesis MP, on the other hand, is
out-of-this- world , with up to four 132 MHz Power PC 604 processors in a single tower-style case; very complex graphics transformations in Photoshop often don’t even have time to draw a progress bar. The absolute giant in the clone business proved to be PowerComputing, which liberally sprinkled their not-terribly- interesting-looking, but quick and aggressively priced, Power Mac compatibles all over both expo sites at dozens of vendor booths.
Random Observations
While I have no strong statistical evidence, virtually all those sneaking out for cigarette breaks seemed to be marketing and sales people. Very few programmers, software engineers, or even MacWorld attendees seemed to be smokers. On the other hand, the marketing and sales force, almost without exception, were far better dressed.
While riding a hotel shuttle bus running between the Bayside Expo Center and the John F. Kennedy subway station, one passenger told me he was a merchant of death and destruction. An elderly couple (not MacWorld attendees) were greatly offended by this, and were only slightly consoled when I explained he worked for a software company making games. “Violent games are behind all our troubles” was the response, “but I guess it’s not as bad as real guns.”
Side Trips
The Computer Museum is within easy walking distance of the World Trade Center. It has a world-class collection of exhibits showing the history of computers and computer devices. An exceptional number of DEC and Apple computers (DEC and Apple are major sponsors) are used in a huge number of interactive displays showing basic computing concepts, voice and music synthesis, robotics, problem-solving, computer vision, and even video games. I began to feel a bit old while looking over the nicely preserved collection of computers I
The museum’s most famous exhibit, a giant “walk in” computer, was scheduled to be taken down the week after Mac World. The museum felt it didn’t do enough (you could use a Volkswagen-sized Kensington trackball to select countries for a travel planner, shown on a house-sized monitor), but two months from now a new, improved version is scheduled to debut. Easily the most popular area is a lab with lots of Macs you can use to link into the World Wide Web. I checked on the Pi’s Web page and used the Web browser to send mail to a couple people. A museum employee was somewhat surprised; “I thought we’d disabled E-mail. Oh, you’re one of those Mac World people.”
If you venture out to Cambridge on the subway, you can visit Cybersmith, an unusual cafe off Harvard Square. In addition to coffee, soft drinks and sandwiches, Cybersmith offers computers and video games. The video games weren’t that heavily used, but the computers – housed in attractive cabinets that also doubled as tables – were in high demand. Patrons purchase time on the computers using a card system, and then sit back in comfortable seating and do – whatever. Most seemed to be either browsing the World Wide Web or looking at each other using Internet-based videoconferencing system. I wasn’t quite certain why people within the same room would pay to use a computer to look at small pictures of one another via the Internet.
Cybersmith also sells computer books and software. Though it caters to both the Windows world and the Mac world, there were more Macs than Windows machines, and all the Macs were in use; the lone Windows user complained bitterly that “all the good computers are taken.”
I handed him a flyer for MacWorld Expo.
Vendors mentioned
The Coca Cola Company, 1-800-438-2653, http://www.cocacola.com
Apple Computer Corp., http://www.apple.com
Mitch Hall Associates, 800-645-EXPO, http://www.mha.com
FutureWave Software, Inc., 800-619-6193, futurewav@aol.com
Claris Corp., 800-3CLARIS, http://www.claris.com
Keep It Simple Systems, 800-327-6882, kiss4@aol.com
Star Nine Technologies, 800-525-2580, http://www.starnine.com, info@starnine.com
IRIS, 407-395-7831
Visioneer, Inc., 800-787-7007
Academic Press Professional, 800-3131-APP, app@acad.com
PeachpitPress, 800-283-9444, http://www.peach pit.com
Route 66, Inc., 800-569-0878
Orange Micro Inc., 714-779-2772
Reply Corp., 800-801-6898, http://www.reply.com
Insignia Solutions, 800-848-7677, maccs@isinc.insignia.com, http://www.insignia.com
Tenon Intersystems, 805-963-6983, info@tenon.com, http://www.tenon.com
Syquest Technology, 510-226-4000
Iomega Corp., 800-MYSTUFF, http://www.iomega.com
Green Design Furniture Co., 207-775-4234
BackSaver Products Company, 800-251-2225
Novell, 801-225-5000, http://www.novell.com
Radius, Inc., 408-541-6100
DayStar Digital, 770-967-2077, genesismp@daystar.com, http://www.daystar.com
PowerComputing, 800-405-7693, info@powercc.com, http://www.powercc.com
The Computer Museum, 617-423-6758, computer_info@tcm.org, http://www.tcm.org
Cybersmith, (617) 492-5857, http://www.cybersmith.com