TechStuff Classic: The Story of Comdex

It was once the computing conference to attend. Today, it's rapidly fading from memory. How did Comdex begin and what happened to it?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode.

(00:24):
This episode originally published March twenty second, twenty seventeen. It
is titled the Story of Comdex. There are a few
the tech related conferences and trade shows that have happened
over the years. Comdex was a really important one for
a while, and now we're going to learn more about it. Enjoy.

(00:50):
This message is from Alex, and Alex said, I really
enjoy listening to your episodes on CEES and also listening
to the shows that you broadcast every year from CEES,
and it got me to thinking about two decades ago,
there was a popular trade show called Comdex, which is
not around anymore. I've always wondered what happened to Comdex

(01:11):
and why it failed as a trade show. I know
that some famous things happen at Comdex. The blue screen
of Death coming up on Bill Gates during a Windows
ninety eight demonstration comes to mind. Thanks for making such
a great show. Well, thank you, Alex for those kind
words and for the suggestion. Guys, remember you can always
write me to make suggestions for show topics or guests

(01:32):
I should have on the show, or even if you
just want to say hi. The email address you can
use is tech stuff at houstuffworks dot com. I'll mention
that again at the end of the show, but I
know some of you tune out before I get to that,
So that's what you can use as an email if
you want to get in touch with me. Now, let's
talk about Comdex and its impact on the tech industry.

(01:53):
I can't just jump right onto condex though, I actually
have to go back a little bit, and I also
have to admit this was a surprisingly challenging topic. There's
not a whole lot written about Comdex as a whole,
apart from some articles in computer industry magazines from the
time that usually focused on either an upcoming show, like

(02:14):
you know, you might read an article in a magazine
from nineteen eighty seven about Comdex eighty seven being around
the corner, or you might see an article that is
talking about just a show that just ended, kind of
similar to how people cover cees. Right, that'll be an
article that says, oh, hey, ces is over here what
the big trends were. But you don't really find a

(02:36):
whole lot of stuff about the life and death of
the show as a whole. You have to find bits
and pieces and then end up putting it all together
and forming it into a meaningful narrative. So this episode
is really the result of hours of research. I had
to piece everything together myself. So typically for every hour

(02:58):
of podcasts that I print, it takes about eight hours
of research. That's typical. This one was way more than that.
It had to be at least twenty hours of research,
maybe more in order to get all of this. But
that's enough stalling. Let's talk about comdex. So back in
nineteen seventy, which is, by the way, many years before

(03:22):
comdex actually officially began, there was a group of entrepreneurs
based out of Needham, Massachusetts, and they included Robert Bob
Lively and Milton Burns, and they created a magazine covering
the world of computers and data communications. And the name
of that publication was The Data comm User, and datacom

(03:44):
was one word and two ms at the end of comm.
This was before the era of the personal computer. It
was even before the era that you would be able
to purchase a kit and make your own personal computer.
This was the era of many computers and micro computers
that were only meant for business or research purposes, so
you didn't really see them in the home, but they

(04:08):
were able to create a successful magazine. In two years
after they launched it, the publishers partnered with a different person,
a future casino magnate Sheldon Gary Adelson, to launch a
new trade show that they were calling the Interface Conference
and Exposition. Now Edelson is or Adelson is an interesting person,

(04:31):
someone of great influence both in Las Vegas and in politics.
He would eventually go on to build one of the
premium casinos on the Strip, the Venetian. Anyway, after several
successful years of running the Interface Conference and Exposition, the
group saw another opportunity. So it's nineteen seventy nine. The

(04:54):
computer industry was starting to gain some traction, with the
home PC market mostly stuck in the world of hobbyists
and early adopters. By seventy nine, it was starting to
slowly emerge from that market, but it wasn't yet to
the point where computers were becoming household objects. It was
fairly rare to run into homes that had won. They

(05:15):
were expensive, and there just weren't a whole lot out there.
You're talking about early Apple computers, you're talking about the
Commodore sixty four, the Tandy, that kind of stuff. More companies, though,
were really looking into incorporating computers into the workplace. So
the Interface Group organized a new event, and this was

(05:37):
called the Computer Dealer's Exhibition, which was later shortened to
the name Comdex. Now, that nineteen seventy nine show was
modest by later standards, and modest is kind of overstating it.
It was tiny compared to the show when it reached
its peak. It took place in the MGM Grand in

(05:59):
Las Veigs, I guess, and that was the MGM Grand
at the time. The MGM Grand of today is not
the same building as the one from nineteen seventy nine,
two totally different places. Approximately four thousand people attended the show,
with about one hundred and fifty seven exhibitors present. Now,
in those days only industry representatives could attend, so you

(06:22):
had to be inside the computer industry in order to
be considered for attendance. So general public was not allowed
to go into the show. It's very similar to the
way CEES is run, and for many years E three
ran that way. Although E three twenty seventeen, which is

(06:43):
you know, I'm recording this in twenty seventeen. E three
twenty seventeen is the first time in several years that
the show is going to be open to the general public,
assuming that you were able to get a badge in time.
I'm going to be at E three this year, so
that will be interesting. I can't wait to see how
it's different from the years past that I have attended

(07:04):
when it was industry only anyway, Condex when it started
only allowed industry members and and it really didn't look
at any of the personal computer stuff at all, because
again that was such a young market. It was really
looking at the business applications for computers. So if you
visit Las Vegas and you go to the MGM Grand,

(07:27):
like I said, that's not the same casino as the
one that hosted the first Comdex. If you want to
visit the building where the first Comdex took place, you
actually have to go to Bally's because that's what the
old MGM Grand turned into. So a walk through Bally's
Casino is also a walk through computer history in a way,

(07:49):
and they really did focus on many computers, which were
named Many, but were honestly pretty huge machines to be fair,
the original computers that came out, those were the ones
that took up like an entire room or sometimes the
floor of a building like. They were huge, huge machines.
Those first computers, the ones that date all the way

(08:11):
back to like the forties and fifties, but the mini
computers of the seventies were still pretty massive machines. And
again they were meant for corporate use or manufacturing or
things like that. They weren't meant to be on your
table at home, so they're industrial computers. Almost all the

(08:31):
interactions at Comdex were all about business to business, with
computer manufacturers courting big corporations like insurance companies and law firms.
So really, if you might represent a computer manufacturer, and
what you're trying to do is get that representative from
that big insurance company to come see your stuff and say, yeah,

(08:54):
you know what, I'm going to put in an order
for X number of machines for us to use at
our corporate office. That was kind of the purpose for Comdex,
So it wasn't the sort of convention that the average
computer junkie would even want to attend that first comdex.
If you are a big computer nerd, you probably still

(09:14):
would not be too keen on that first Comdex because
it just it was geared toward a different type of person.
It's more for business now. Exhibitors also attended shows like
Comdex for another reason, not just to connect with potential customers,
They also wanted to see what the competition was up to.

(09:38):
Keep in mind, these trade shows allowed companies to show
off stuff that was in development, stuff that had not
yet hit the market. That meant that if you were
a competitor, you might get a look at someone's products
before they actually hit store shelves, and if you are able,
you might be able to suss out how those products

(09:59):
are working and figure out your own version of that
same product. It's not quite the same thing as copying
someone else. It might involve some reverse engineering, not a
little ethically questionable, but it certainly was something that happened
all the time. If a competitor's computers incorporated a new
feature that you saw, customers were really finding to be compelling.

(10:21):
You might go back to your team and say, hey,
competitor X has this new peripheral and people are going
gaga over it. We've got to create something equal to
or better than that for our products. So it's really
just a fuel for competition. And just like CEES gives
rise to certain trends each year, so did comdex. So

(10:43):
another reason why companies would attend is to see what
trends are starting to come up and should there be
some that the company needs to get involved in, they
could end up dedicating some resources to it and then
become a player in that space. The worst thing in
the world would be to be left behind and become
obsolete and see your company's business failed because you weren't

(11:06):
able to capitalize on an emerging trend. So some companies
would send people out there just to see, all right, well,
what's big this year and what do we need to
pay attention to, So it really was all about business now.
The event was a success, and the group planned a
second event for nineteen eighty and this one took place

(11:28):
in the Las Vegas Convention Center. It had outgrown the
MGM Grand but a few attendees were staying at the
MGM Grand. That's just that was the place where they
had booked a room, but the show had already outgrown
the conference rooms there. The new venue boasted twenty five
thousand square feet of exhibition space, and more than seven

(11:49):
thousand people attended the show, so they nearly doubled in size. Now,
that was the first year for the show to use
Comdex as a name, and it was also a tragic year.
Something really disastrous happened that year. On the very last
day of the Comdex conference, a fire broke out in

(12:11):
the MGM Grand overnight, and it was a serious fire,
and more than eighty people died, most of them from
smoke inhalation because the smoke went up into the rooms
and a lot of people were asleep and they never
woke up. Out of those eighty people, eight of them
were attending Comdex, and the tragedy marks the worst disaster

(12:31):
in Nevada history and the third worst hotel fire in
US history. The cause of the fire was ultimately traced
to an electrical ground fault in a wall socket. They
had a nearby cooling unit for a pastry display case
that had a pair of copper pipes that were exposed.
The insulation had worn down. The copper pipes had been

(12:54):
vibrating at times, and that vibration had caused the pipes
to rub together. The insulation protecting the pipes worn away,
which meant that they could rub against each other, and
this eventually caused the short, the electrical short, which then
caused a fire. The fire spread very quickly and it

(13:14):
was a huge story both in Las Vegas and in
the computer industry. Now, despite this tragedy, the conference continued
and grew. It was on that last day of the conference.
The following year it was even bigger. You would actually
see Comdex expand to two shows in that year. So
in the springtime, the organization launched a Comdex show in

(13:38):
New York. The fall show stayed in Las Vegas. So
they were splitting up to two shows a year, with
one on the East Coast and one in Las Vegas.
The New York show was a big success. It was
more than twice as big as the first Comdex show
in Vegas. It had eleven thousand attendees and two hundred

(14:01):
and thirty seven exhibitors. That Vegas show happened in the fall,
and this was huge business, not just for the exhibitors
and the attending professionals, but also for the organizers themselves.
They were making a huge amount of profit. At its peak,
Condex could command fifty nine dollars per square foot of

(14:22):
exhibit space, and when it was the biggest trade show around,
there was more than one point three million square feet available,
and Comdex staffers were really really pushing for companies to
end up leasing that space, so they were making bookoos
of dollars serious cash just so they a company can

(14:47):
rent some carpeted floor. Yeah, if you want to read
some vitriol about Condex, just do some searches about how
much money the organizers were making back in these days,
and how a lot of the exhibitors felt that they
were being almost like extorted in order to rent larger

(15:09):
and larger spaces year over year, like they were being
pressured by staffers who were acting like salesmen to rent
more space each successful year. It's one of the reasons
why some companies said that they ultimately abandoned the show.
Well back in nineteen eighty one, the show was still growing,

(15:31):
just as the computer industry was growing and holding two
shows ended up working out with the Spring Show in
New York and the Fall Show in Las Vegas. So
in nineteen eighty two they expanded again, and this time
there were three shows. The Spring event occurred in Atlantic
City aka the Las Vegas of the East Coast, and
the Fall Show happened in Las Vegas. But there was

(15:53):
a third show that happened in Europe and it took
place in Amsterdam. That marked the beginning of Condex expanding
beyond the United Stas States. Now that trend would continue
and snowball over the following years. So you start looking
at the number of shows Condex was holding year over year,
and it kept on increasing. In two thousand and two,

(16:13):
there were eighteen Condex shows scheduled throughout that year, eighteen
different events across the globe in two thousand and two. Now,
one of those, the one that was scheduled for Mexico City,
ended up getting canceled, but that still means there were
seventeen shows in two thousand and two. I mean, that's

(16:35):
think about how many resources you would have to dedicate
to hold that many events around the world. All right,
But back to the nineteen eighties, So after those first
few years when everyone was concentrating on many computers and
business to business type stuff, personal computers began to play
a role in shows because they were starting to take off.

(16:56):
People were starting to purchase personal computers at a larger rate,
was going beyond the hobbyist and beyond the early adopter,
and so it became part of comdex history. He started
seeing computers like the Apple two E and the first
IBM compatible computers. First you saw the IBM computers, and
then shortly after that you saw the IBM clones that

(17:18):
were making their way to market. And you also had
other computers like the Commodore sixty four, the Tandy computer,
and the Amiga line of computers which originally came from
Commodore as well. And one of these days I'm gonna
have to do a full show about Tandy, I think,
because it's hard to believe that a company that started
off as a leather goods company got into the personal
computer business. And for that matter, I should probably talk

(17:40):
about IBM compatibles and clones too, as that was a big,
big deal early on in the personal computer age and
one of the reasons why IBM got out of the
consumer computer market. Entirely for many years. But the important thing,
the important thing to remember in this part of the
Comdex story is that these companies were becoming important enough

(18:01):
to warrant a spot on the show floor. By nineteen
eighty three, Condex started holding a show in Atlanta, that
is the city where I am in. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia,
so I remember Condex being talked about. I was a
kid in the eighties and I never attended a Comdex,
but I remember people talking about them, and the show

(18:24):
in Atlanta would continue yearly until nineteen ninety six, and
at that point Condex began to alternate between Atlanta and
Chicago every year. So I probably would have been pretty
bored if I had gone to one of the comdexes
in Atlanta. I mean, these shows were huge, and there
were lots of booths and everything, but again it was

(18:45):
mostly about like productivity machines and software, and not really
the kind of stuff I was interested in, which was
namely computer games. You didn't really see a whole lot
of that Condex because that's just not what the focus
of the show was about. Also, in nineteen eighty three,
I love this Bill Gates gave his first speech at
a Comdex in nineteen eighty three, and that would become

(19:06):
a regular event over future shows, and Gates would end
up getting larger audiences every year. He would command a
bigger room every year. It obviously became a much more
important event in future comdexes, but back in nineteen eighty
three it was rather modest in comparison, so much so
that the projectionist for Bill Gates's presentation was his own father.

(19:30):
I just think that's kind of a charming little bit
of information. Well, I've got more to say about what
happened to Comdex in the nineteen eighties, but before I
get into that, let's take a quick break to thank
our sponsor. All right, So a couple of big events

(19:53):
happened in the early nineteen eighties that rippled through Comdex.
For one thing, the Macintosh debuted in nineteen eighty four,
and that's when the graphics user interface, or GUY, became
big in home personal computers. The Windows system Microsoft Windows
also made a big splash around that same time, and

(20:14):
Microsoft and Apple had worked together developing a GUY. It
wasn't exactly you might hear stories about, Oh well, Windows
was just copying the mac os. It's not entirely true. Actually,
the two companies were working together to develop Guy's and
to be fair, the graphic user interface wasn't developed out
of Apple or Microsoft. The graphic user Interface originated as

(20:36):
a project out of Xerox Park, But that's another story
for another time. The graphics user Interface, however, was changing
computers because it was seen as a much more intuitive,
easy to understand system than command line systems. So in
the old days, if you wanted to run a program

(20:58):
on your computer, you had to type in run in
the program name, and then the computer would know to
execute that command and start that program. You might have
some programs that had an auto startup based upon the
disc that you were using, and that would make things
a little more smooth. But until the graphics user interface

(21:19):
came along, you couldn't just click on an icon and
have something start. You actually had to type stuff in,
and it wasn't exactly user friendly for people who weren't
already interested in computers, so it was sort of a
barrier to entry. The graphic user interface lowered that barrier,
and that's really when we started seeing personal computers take off,

(21:40):
not just for homes, but in schools and all sorts
of places. So the Macintosh and the Windows system were
really important, and they dominated the show floor. By nineteen
eighty five, everyone was talking about Windows based systems and
graphic user interfaces. And it's funny because if you look
back on these early comdex shows, you can see the

(22:03):
debut of stuff that we all take for granted now,
stuff that you know well of course that exists. Sometimes
we're looking at debuts from stuff that's completely obsolete at
this point. So if you are able to find videos
from that era and you watch them, it's almost comical
to see them debut because it's ancient history now in

(22:25):
the computer world. One of the resources I used when
researching this show was an episode of The Computer Chronicles
from nineteen eighty six. So at the beginning of that episode,
the CEO of Digital Research talked about how applications had
suddenly become important, So he was referring to programs like
desktop publishing software or spreadsheet management programs, things like that,

(22:50):
and that they were taking center stage because they were
taking advantage of this graphic user interface. It's really similar
in a way to how smartphone apps have become a
major focus in the tech industry. Today. The hardware is
still important, but a lot more attention is going towards
the software running on top of the hardware. Well. Condex

(23:11):
was also where companies could show off new products like
laser printers, which in the eighties were super super new
and exciting, or computer peripherals, or computer systems and software packages.
And because the industry was heating up, the show just
kept getting larger and more grandiose every year. And it
wasn't long before companies began employing young women to entice

(23:33):
people into booths. And I saw one journalist's account of
an early nineteen eighties Condex that dismissively referred to these
women as demo dollies. Now at cees, you tend to
hear these women being referred to as booth babes, and
I just like to take a moment to address this

(23:55):
because it bugs me. So as I get older, I
get more uncomfortable with these terms. And that's because they
ignore the fact that these women are human beings. Many
of them may be hired because of their appearance. You know.
It might be that they have a modeling agency and
a company hires them because of their profile and the

(24:17):
modeling agency, and so it's completely based on their appearance.
But it doesn't change the fact that we're talking about
actual people here. I'm not a fan of companies using
sex appeal to get people to pay attention to their stuff,
particularly if we're talking about products that have nothing to
do with being sexy in the first place. But the
women and men too, because we see male models also

(24:41):
being pulled in for this duty, especially for things like
wearables and sports type of technology. At places like ces,
we see both women and men who are you know,
chiseled from marble showing these off. But that makes sense,
you understand, right, all right, This person is fit and

(25:01):
the product is promising to help you get fit, so
you see the connection there. It's a little more tough
if you're like, this is a case for a smartphone
and this woman wearing barely anything is holding the case.
It's a little harder to justify. I don't hold it
against the models. They're doing a job. They were hired

(25:22):
to do a job, and that's what they're doing. And
I also realize that my opinions are just my own,
and that I'm probably being a bit too old fashioned
but my main point is just to remember these are people,
not just a walking, talking display. So I hate terms
like booth babes or demo dollies, which I think is
even somehow worse than booth babes because it is so dismissive.

(25:47):
It's treating a person like an object. It truly is objectification,
and I don't care for that. So old man lecture
is over. But seriously, demo dollies come on anyway. By
the mid nineteen eighties, companies creating IBM compatible machines had
pretty much run IBM out of the consumer PC business.

(26:09):
The clones of IBM's machines were perfectly legal as long
as the company's making them could demonstrate that they didn't
steal IBM's approach but rather reverse engineered it, which seems
like a pretty fine detail, but it's one that made
the production of IBM clones completely legal. More on that
if I ever do a full episode about IBM compatible

(26:30):
computers now. Watching the Computer Chronicles also reminded me how
the industry at that time was dominated by dudes. You know,
in the nineteen eighties, if you looked at the show
floor for Comdex, men outnumbered women, by an enormous percentage.

(26:51):
Apart from the women who were hired to lure people
into booths, you hardly saw any females on the floor
at all. But as the industry would make sured, we
saw more women taking roles in the industry, including leadership roles.
But I'm pretty sure those early CONDEX shows saw really
long lines at the men's room and like almost completely

(27:12):
empty women's restrooms, so an interesting juxtaposition and other compared
to other arenas. The same thing was true of Consumer
Electronics Show, and in fact, I would argue it's still
largely true. We're seeing more and more women on the
show floor at cees, both in leadership positions and attendees

(27:36):
that kind of thing, but I think it's still far
more men than women. But the early days of CONDEX,
it was ridiculous that imbalance. One of the most amusing
elements of the Computer Chronicles episode I watched was the
segment dedicated to portable computers. So back in the nineteen eighties,

(27:59):
this was nineteen eight those devices were huge, largely because
they had to have five and a quarter inch floppy
disk drives, because that was the main media of choice
in the mid eighties. The laptops, even the light ones,
weighed somewhere around twelve pounds or more, so they were
hefty enough that you wouldn't want them on your lap

(28:19):
for very long. You'd also probably chuckle at hearing some
of the processor speeds being promoted back in those days.
You hear something like this processor has sixteen mega hurtz
processor speed, and that's probably not going to impress you
very much today, but you know different time. Another interesting

(28:40):
product that was introduced and featured in that show was
from Phillips. It was a data storage system that consisted
of twenty different discs arranged in a case. The discs
were in cartridges, and a mechanical arm could go up
or down the rack of cartridges and retrieve or insert
discs to access the information on them. Now, each disk

(29:02):
was twelve inches in diameter, and each disc could hold
two whole gigabytes of information on it, which meant that
the entire apparatus could hold forty gigabytes. So think about
that for a moment. They're smartphones right now that can
hold more than three times that amount of information, and
those will fit in your pocket. So we've really come
a long way since the nineteen eighties. We're going to

(29:24):
take a quick break in the story of context to
thank our sponsors, but we'll be right back. The nineteen
eighty six condext show also had some of the earliest
devices that we would put into the wearable category today.

(29:47):
Puma showed off a gadget that snapped onto their running
shoes and it had a microprocessor inside of it that
could detect whenever your foot made impact with the ground,
and it acted as a step counter, so you could
use it on a run and you could do your run,
and then after you were done running, you would have
to go back home and you would have to use

(30:09):
a cable to hook the gadget up to your computer
and pull the data off of the device so that
you could look at it through the software running on
your computer. That would give you a visualization of the data,
and then you could see how far you ran and
how many calories you burned. It's not quite as easy
as connecting everything via Bluetooth, which is typically how it

(30:30):
happens today, but it was a hint of what would
follow almost thirty years later. Other emerging technologies that began
to pop up at Comdex in the early to mid
nineteen eighties included voice recognition, optical discs so CDs, and
things like that, three and a half inch floppy disks
and others, and we began to see the interesting seesaw

(30:52):
relationship between hardware and software. So if you read articles
from the nineteen eighties about Condex, you'll see journalists point
out out that these incredibly powerful computers that were hitting
the market didn't have any software that took advantage of
all that raw power. They'd say like, well, yeah, you
can get this super fast machine, but what good is that.

(31:14):
I mean, there's no software that really takes advantage of
this machine's capabilities. We're never going to see that happen.
I mean, it'll run existing software faster, so if you've
got like a huge spreadsheet, it won't take as long
for it to load. But other than that, I mean,
why would you need all that power? Now, it's kind
of funny to think that a three eighty six processor

(31:36):
computer from the mid nineteen eighties was thought to be
more powerful than anything you would ever need, because a
three eighty six computer compared to today's smartphones would see
clunky and slow in comparison. Since those days, we've seen
a lot more tech journalists agree to what is called
Worth's law, which is named after Nicholas Worth, who observed

(31:57):
that software speed was decreasing at a rate faster than
hardware speed was increasing. So, in other words, software is
getting bloated and requires more resources to run faster than
we're seeing improvements in those resources. So year over year,
it feels like computers are going slower rather than faster.

(32:19):
It's not that the computers are less powerful than they
were before. It's that the software requires more power than
the previous generations software. And that's because we get bloat
software bloat over the course of many versions of the
same program. So take take a word processor program. Well,

(32:39):
every successive version of that word processor program is likely
to be larger and more resource hungry than the version
before because a company has to start including more and
more features to convince you to upgrade to buy the
newest version. Otherwise, you would just buy one version and

(33:00):
you'd stick with it until, you know, until it just
literally could not measure up to what you needed it
to do. I mean, why would I need to buy
a new word processor program if I've got one that
works just fine. So to convince me to buy a
new one. Companies are going to add more and more features. Well.
As software gets more complex, it becomes less efficient and

(33:23):
therefore it requires more power to run. And even to
this day, there's still a temptation to declare a machine
that has a screaming fast processor and cavernous storage capacity
as being more than what you are ever going to need.
But the more seasoned computer users among us know that
eventually software is going to use up and maybe even

(33:46):
exceed that hardware's capabilities. So if you build it, the
software will fill it. It's kind of like if you
build it, they will come. Now. The show in Vegas
in nineteen eighty was just one of seven. The other
six shows happened in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Nice,

(34:07):
and Sydney. And the show in nineteen eighty six in
Vegas lasted five days. That was the longest conference up
to that point. So things were still on the rise.
Everything was still growing every year. More money was being
poured into the show, and each show meant that there
was more square footage to lease to companies, and the
organizers were making some serious bank in those days. Meanwhile,

(34:30):
exhibitors were enjoying the benefits of connecting with customers and
getting an eye on what the competition was up to,
and a lot of ideas were launched at Comdex, not
all of them successfully. There were plenty of examples of
products that never went anywhere, and vaporware became a common word. Vaporware,
by the way, is when you announce a product that
never actually comes to market. It just remains vapor. It's

(34:52):
the kaiser SoSE of the technological world. Now, some Comdex
shows also became vapor aware. In nineteen eighty seven, and
in nineteen eighty eight, the planned Comdex event in Tokyo
was postponed, essentially canceled. It never really happened. The nineteen
ninety one event for Paris was canceled outright now, things

(35:14):
were not dire, not by a long shot, but there
were some growing pains as the organizers kept trying to
increase the show's reach. Sometimes they did it faster than
they could actually support, and typically the reason these shows
would get canceled is because they weren't. The show organizers
weren't able to sell out enough space on the show

(35:34):
floor to justify holding the trade show, so they couldn't
get enough vendors to agree to come to a show,
they'd postpone it or cancel it rather than lose money
on throwing a show with a small number of exhibitors.
By the late nineteen eighties, Comdex was looking to grow

(35:55):
some more, so it changed its attendance policy and started
to sell it admission to the general public. So for
the first time, people unaffiliated with the industry or people
who were not in the media could actually come to
the show, and no big surprise here, Attendance numbers exploded
as a result. Now, this was not necessarily welcomed by

(36:16):
all the other attendees. Some people were complaining that it
was becoming too difficult to navigate the floor because it
was just there were just too many people. There are
too many bodies in the way. And other people were
worried that the show would turn into an enormous marketplace
with the general public purchasing products directly from manufacturers rather
than retailers. You know, like, why bother packing this device

(36:38):
back up and shipping it back to your headquarters. I'll
just buy it off of you right here. Even though
it's not scheduled to launch for another three months. You
also heard a lot of people say the show was
starting to lose its focus. It was it was starting
to incorporate too many things outside of the core computer
and computer peripheral industry, and as a result, there were

(37:00):
a lot of people worried that the show was starting
to spiral out of control. Now, the early nineteen nineties
saw the rise of a new, very important player in
the computer space, and that is the Internet. While the
mainstream public was still getting a handle on what the
Internet was back in the early nineteen nineties, condext began

(37:20):
to feature more exhibitors promising the information super Highway would
change everything, and in many ways they were right, though
not all of their predictions would turn out to be accurate.
For one thing, in the early nineteen nineties, no one
really had an idea of how the Internet could become
a massive tool for commerce. It was more like a
point of contact for people. So companies might have a website,

(37:44):
but it was meant to give information about a company
or to allow a potential customer or an existing customer
to contact the company. But there wasn't a whole lot
beyond that in those early days, especially since the World
Wide Web didn't really debut in until ninety two ninety three,
So before that you're just talking about stuff like email

(38:05):
and some other functions that were mainly used in the
academic world and were just barely getting a foothold in
the corporate and then public world. Now over the next
several years, more exhibitors would show off systems designed to
make accessing the Internet more intuitive and seamless, all the
way from operating systems to web browsers. In early nineteen

(38:28):
ninety five, news broke that a suitor to Comdex would
be taking over the show, and that suitor was a
Japanese software company called soft Bank. The company made an
eight hundred million dollars deal with the Interface Group to
acquire the trade show. Now in nineteen ninety four, soft

(38:49):
Bank had already purchased a publishing, exposition and conference division
from the company's Zif Davis. They had tried to buy
Ziff Davis outright, but Ziff Davis were used and then
instead settled on buying this division within Ziff Davis. So
Ziff Davis spins out of division sells it to SoftBank.
This division was an events planning division for publishing expositions.

(39:15):
Then soft Bank goes and buys Comdex from the Interface
Group for eight hundred million dollars. Now, these two purchases
made SoftBank the largest name in the trade show game,
and it also gave some prestige to the CEO of SoftBank,
who is a Masayoshi's son, who was sometimes called the
Bill Gates of Japan, and his story is really interesting too.

(39:38):
Sun had overcome poverty and also social stigma to become
a successful businessman in Japan. He was the son of
two Korean immigrants, and in Japan at the time, Koreans
were sometimes the victims of racial prejudice, so his story
is pretty interesting. Maybe I'll do an episode about him sometime.
At this point, Comdex was enormous. The nineteen ninety four

(40:00):
show in Vegas had almost two hundred thousand people in attendance.
That's a huge jump from that four thousand from nineteen
seventy nine. Now, keep in mind they also opened up
the doors to the general public, so part of that
growth was just from people curious to learn more about
the latest computers, but they had no connection to the
industry itself. Now, along with the growth in attendance was

(40:23):
a growth of complaints among exhibitors. Some companies were protesting
what they considered to be unfair fees and rental rates.
But even though they felt that perhaps things were becoming
a little unfair, most companies also felt that the show
was too important to skip. They couldn't skip out on it,
or else they would be left behind by their competitors.

(40:45):
So they would show up and they would pay. There
had been talks of launching a competitor show, like a
bunch of groups saying, you know what, forget this, We're
gonna go out and make our own trade show, but
they hadn't really gone far beyond just some big talk. Now,
in the next section, I'm going to really concentrate on

(41:06):
how the show got to its largest point and then
what happened to make it disappear over the next few years.
But before I get into that, let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So it's nineteen

(41:29):
ninety seven. Comdex hits its peak, It gets the largest
it will ever get. In nineteen ninety seven, the number
of exhibitors was more than twenty four hundred and eighty
and they were taking up one point thirty five million
square feet of space on the show floor in the
primary Vegas show of the year, the number of attendees

(41:52):
was about two hundred and forty thousand. I mean a
huge number of people, like a quarter of a million
people almost at nineteen ninety seven Comdex Las Vegas. This
was a monster of a show, but it also marked
the beginning of the decline of Condex. Exhibitors were complaining
even more about predatory practices of Comdex staffers, pressuring companies

(42:16):
to invest in larger booths year over year. They were saying, well,
we want to be part of the show, but every
year we're making the arrangements. Everyone's pressuring us to make
our booth bigger than the year before, which means we
have to spend more money in order to be part
of this show. And it's getting ridiculous. It got so

(42:36):
ridiculous for some companies that began to drop out, including
big names. IBM withdrew from Comdex because of these practices,
and according to a CNN Money report from two thousand
and three, Condex became a quote magnet for dumb money
end quote. Now what they meant by that is that

(42:57):
if you participated in Comdex year over year, that was
just a recipe of diminishing returns. You were going to
see fewer and fewer benefits of being part of the show,
and ultimately it would become a drain on resources, meaning
you're losing more money attending the show than you're making
out of business because of the show. So more exhibitors

(43:20):
were starting to drop out following nineteen ninety seven. They
were saying, well, I'm spending money, but I don't see
the return on investment. This is like putting a big
time commercial out on a channel that no one is watching.
What's the point now? Behind the scenes, in a series
of moves so complicated, I don't even understand them, SoftBank

(43:44):
reorganized its divisions and departments. So it took the division
that owned Condex and that publishing conference I talked about before.
It was essentially known as ZD Events at the time,
and transformed this into a new and a publicly traded
entity called Key three Media. That's key the numeral three

(44:07):
and media all is one word. And this was a
holding company. It was just existed to hold these assets.
That's all it did. Now SoftBank held about half of
the ownership of Key three Media, but eventually it would
spin it off completely. Now that happened after SoftBank tried
to auction off the events division. So why was it

(44:31):
trying to sell something the company had only purchased a
couple of years before. Perhaps organizing and running the events
was too far outside the wheelhouse of the software corporation.
The acquisition of Condex and Ziff Davis's publishing conference didn't
necessarily include the people with the knowledge and experience of
organizing those events. At any rate, the auction did not

(44:54):
result in any satisfactory offers. Apparently, the largest offer on
the table was for six hundred forty million dollars, which
is way less than the eight hundred million soft Bank
paid for Comdex alone, never mind the Ziff Davis deal.
So Key three Media would eventually become an independent spinoff
and the sole owner of Comdex. Now. The head of

(45:15):
Key three Media was a guy named Fred Rosen, and
Rosen had made a fortune growing and then selling Ticketmaster
Boom Ticketmaster. That's my own personal bias coming through. I
have an issue with Ticketmaster. I have many issues with Ticketmaster.
I should do an episode about them, but it will

(45:36):
be the most unbiased, unforgiving episode of tech stuff. Ever,
so maybe I should just keep a trap shut anyway.
Rosen reportedly ran Key three as if it were a
massive corporation rather than an events production company. He moved
the headquarters to an expensive part of Los Angeles, not
too far from his own mansion, and he would end
up taking company trips on a private jet across the world.

(45:58):
His salary was one and a half million dollars in
two thousand and one. That's a big salary for a CEO,
especially considering most CEOs get the majority of their compensation
and benefits as opposed to a direct salary. Million and
a half in two thousand and one is no chump change.
Former employees said that his managerial style was incredibly confrontational

(46:19):
and off putting, so much so that he was driving
away staffers who had been working in the trade show
industry for decades, which meant that, as a result, Key
three was depleting its company's talent pool. You had fewer
and fewer people around who knew how to handle trade shows,
so it was a mess, to put it lightly. Now,

(46:44):
this takes us to nineteen ninety eight, and this was
the year that featured that infamous blue screen of death.
During a demonstration of an early build of Windows ninety eight.
You heard our listener Alex refer to this earlier. So
what happened? Well, Bill Gates and Chris Capocella were on
stage during the keynote event to talk about Windows ninety eight,

(47:06):
which had not yet launched. It was still in development,
it had actually been delayed, and Capaseella was trying to
show how Windows ninety eight could download drivers. Drivers are
these components that are needed for software and hardware to
work with the operating system, and he was explaining how
seamless this operation was when the computer crashed and went

(47:27):
to the blue screen of death, at which point Bill
Gates started chuckling and Caposeella was like doing a little
bit of a shuffle. He was very quickly trying to
switch away from the monitor screen and it could have
been an embarrassing disaster, but I think they actually handled
the problem really well with humor. So the audience started laughing,

(47:48):
and Capaseella, who was responding to the audience's laughter at
the blue screen of death, said moving right along in
a very self deprecating way, like he wasn't angry. He
seemed a little chagrined. But not completely thrown off. And
then Bill Gates said this must be why we're not
shipping Windows ninety eight yet, to which Capisella said, absolutely, absolutely,

(48:14):
So it was a moment that reminded everyone that sometimes
stuff just goes wrong. And I actually like watching this clip.
I was afraid to watch it. I never watched it
at the time, And I tend to feel a lot
of empathy for people who are giving a public presentation
because there are enormous pressures on you when you are
giving a live speech in front of a big crowd
of people. Keep in mind, we're talking condex when the

(48:38):
attendance is like two hundred thousand plus people. You could
have thousands of people in that audience all focusing on
you and something goes wrong. I feel nothing but empathy
because I've been in those kind of situations at a
much smaller scale and it feels like torture. But I
liked watching this clip because it didn't feel awful. It

(48:58):
felt like they handled this pretty well as it feels
actually pretty natural. So for one thing, it's not a
presentation that fools you into thinking a product as completely flawless.
If you've ever been to any product demonstration where it's
clear everything has been pre recorded and rehearsed so that
nothing goes wrong. It doesn't feel genuine, and you might

(49:22):
even feel when you get your hands on the real
thing that you were given a misrepresentation of what it
was all about. Seeing something kind of fail and people
acknowledge it and move on was a little refreshing. So
it's just a kind of a funny moment, and something
that Microsoft presentations frequently had, that is funny moments, not failures.
And some of those funny moments were intentional, and some

(49:44):
of them were not intentional. Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers. Nineteen
ninety eight was also the first year to see a
major decline in attendance. So I said two hundred thousand,
but actually it was fewer than that. At that point,
this was the big beginning of the end for Comdex,
though at the time no one could see that. It
did just appear to be a blip in the growth,

(50:06):
and the following year saw another dip, and the number
of exhibitors in two thousand, or in nineteen ninety nine
rather was a one nine hundred and eleven, so more
than twenty four hundred in ninety seven. In ninety nine one,
nine hundred eleven, we start seeing fewer exhibitors showing up.
More people are irritated with the way Comdex is running things,

(50:27):
or rather the way Key three Media is running things,
and are not coming back. Now. There was a little
bit of a rally in two thousand, a few more
exhibitors signed up, mostly new companies, but that was not
to last. Also in nineteen ninety nine, Comdex organizers shook
things up by changing the requirements for mass media, and

(50:48):
a lot of major outlets that had been covering Condex
since the beginning found themselves turned away, and that really
shook things up. I mean, you had big, big names
in mass media total that they were not going to
be allowed to attend Comdex, and that did not help
the organization at all. I mean, making sure that you

(51:09):
alienate media is a good way to have some pretty
negative coverage about your organization. And in two thousand and
two thousand and one, there was another problem. This was
outside of Comdex. This was a huge problem that had
global implications, and I'm talking about the dot com bubble burst.

(51:30):
So the dot com bubble, that's when you had all
these web based companies popping up getting huge amounts of
investment capital, whether it was private investment or the company
had gone public very early, the value of the company
was inflated beyond what it could actually do, and then
ultimately many of these companies failed to show any real

(51:53):
value and the bubble, this investment bubble burst. Dozens of
companies went under, and companies in the computer industry in
general suffered, even if they weren't directly tied to dot com,
because they were in the computer industry, they were hit
pretty hard because there was a ripple effect that came
outward from the dot com companies to all the other

(52:14):
computer companies that were, you know, kind of in that
same pool, even though they weren't necessarily themselves a dot
com company. Well, that meant that that ripple effect continued
to hit comdex. And another event also ended up really
setting comdex back, and that was the terrorist attack on

(52:35):
September eleventh, two thousand and one in the United States
that affected trade shows. Because it ended up affecting international travel.
It scaled back international travel to a huge degree in
the wake of those attacks, completely understandably. I mean, there's
there's there's nothing else to say about that, but it
did affect the trade shows at a time when Comdex

(52:58):
was already having problems. So the Las Vegas Condex show
in two thousand and one had one hundred and twenty
five thousand attendees. That's still a large number of people,
you know, one hundred and twenty five thousand, but still
very short of that two hundred forty thousand the show
had at its peak. In two thousand and two, Key

(53:19):
three Media was in dire straits and not the band.
With three days to go before the Las Vegas Trade
Show opened, the company announced in its quarterly earning statement
that it might have to enter Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection
if it could not raise more capital, or sell the
company off or find a merger partner. Key three Media's

(53:41):
revenue had plummeted in two thousand and two, so in
two thousand and one, the third quarter revenues were at
fifty one and a half million. In two thousand and two,
third quarter revenues were down to thirty eight point four million.
That's a big drop over the course of the full year.
The company had lost nearly three hundred million dollars in
two thousand and one, it was in the black. It

(54:02):
had made a profit of fourteen point one million. It's
a small profit relatively speaking, but the loss of three
hundred million that's a huge, huge downturn. Things were looking
pretty awful. On top of that, the company had an
upcoming interest payment on a debt it owed, and no
one was really sure if they the company would actually

(54:25):
be able to sign the check to pay off that
interest payment, which is why they were looking at the
possibility of entering Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. Shares of Key
three Media were down to a measly one point four
cents per share. It's pretty ugly, folks now. In February
two thousand and three, the Key three Media filed for
Chapter eleven protection. When it finally emerged from Chapter eleven,

(54:48):
so they were able to get their act together and
come out of Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. They also rebranded themselves.
They were no longer Key three Media. Now they were
called Media Live, and there was some hope that this
new brand would be able to recapture the glory days
of comdexes in the past, but it was not meant

(55:10):
to be. The two thousand and three show drew only
fifty thousand attendees. Fifty thousand still a lot of people,
but not compared to two hundred forty thousand. In two
thousand and four, In a move that shocked very few people,
Condex Las Vegas was canceled. The struggles of Media Alive
were well known. They were pretty public. People knew that

(55:31):
the company was in trouble. Attendance had dropped significantly over
the past few years, so many large companies had pulled
out of the show, expressing their exasperation of dealing with
the policies and high pressure sales tactics of the organizers.
There was still some hope along Media Live lines that
two thousand and five would be different, that they would

(55:53):
be able to come back in two thousand and five
and two thousand and four would just be a year off.
But in two thousand and five, all of the company's
planned Comdex events were canceled except for one so it
was supposed to happen in Las Vegas, but it didn't.
The only Comdex event to happen in that year was
in Greece in Athens, but all the other ones were canceled.

(56:16):
Analysts said that the implosion of Comdex came about due
to a mix of mismanagement, depletion of talent, bad marketing choices,
and also just that exhibitors weren't willing to play ball anymore.
So the problem was that they couldn't get enough companies
to agree to be part of the show. To have
a show, It's kind of like throwing a huge party

(56:38):
advertised as a star studded event, but the only celebrities
who show up are a couple of folks from one
of the later seasons of MTVS. The Real World doesn't
really work. You can't really fuel a celebrity party that way.
No offense to anyone who's ever been on MTV's The
Real World. It didn't help that shows like the con

(57:00):
Suomer Electronics Show, now known just as CEES, had become
more popular. Some of the big names that had been
regulars at Comdex had withdrawn and now were attending cees instead.
Comdex would see a bit of a revival, a strange
revival in twenty ten. So it had gone dead between

(57:21):
two thousand and four and twenty ten, but in twenty
ten we saw Comdex Virtual, so instead of a physical
trade show that you would go and attend, featuring thousands
of people walking around the convention center. Condex Virtual was
a website you would go to and it simulated a
trade show. You could watch keynote speeches, and you could

(57:41):
virtually visit vendor booths. And it showed up again in
twenty eleven and one more time in twenty twelve, and
then it faded away. If you were to go to
the Condex Virtual website today, you would get an under
construction page, which seems charmingly out of date if you
ask me. And that's the story of Condex from its

(58:03):
birth to its death. Trade shows still exist. Some of
them are as large or larger than Condex was at
its height. Others are a bit more modest. And we're
seeing some companies like Apple and Google concentrate on holding
their own events rather than abiding by an annual trade
show schedule. So instead of saying we're going to hold
off on announcing something until someone else's schedule lines up,

(58:28):
they say, no, we'll hold our own events, and we don't.
That way, we don't get lost in the shuffle. And
that was the story of Condex, a show that originally
published on March twenty second, twenty seventeen. It's funny because
other trade shows can certainly join the ranks of Condex
of shows that used to be important in tech and
now no longer exist. Arguably E three could be on

(58:53):
that list because they've had to cancel it a couple
of times. But as I'm recording these intros and outros, uh,
the the death knell for E three has not yet rung,
so maybe it's just mostly dead. It'll come back after,
you know, Miracle Max gets a gets a whack at it.

(59:15):
We'll have to wait and see. But Comdex, no, it's
really most sincerely dead. It's like the wicked Witch of
the East. I hope all of you are well, and
I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an iHeart Radio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(59:38):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.