Posted 28 October 1989
I met Mike Klein of LAN Technology on the first day, Tuesday, in IMC’s booth. He or the space rep he was with said that Laird Foshay had mentioned my name once upon a time (probably he’s after my hide for selling M&T a number of Gateway G/Net cards long ago) and that I should come round the LAN Technology party after the show to shake hands all around. Unfortunately, I had a pressing engagement with a cocktail waitress and some of IMC’s customers at the Stouffer Hotel, and never made it to the LT party, which, I believe, only lasted until 7:00pm anyway.
After drinkies I wandered over to the Thomas-Conrad party in the Anatole Hotel, but I was a little late and the potato skins were all cold (I ate a few anyway). The theme of TCC’s new ad campaign for their Macintosh ARCnet is “Alien Encounter,” but from the looks of the party it should have been “Aliens Among Us.” Vast hordes of ARCnet weenies were wandering about, extolling the virtues of token-passing, and, as usual, shamelessly undertipping the bartender. The whole place was festooned with purple and silver balloons, and there was a keyboardist in one corner made up like a wookie or a sand wraith or something playing what sounded like most of the soundtrack from Liquid Sky on a portable synthesizer. But we all love the folks from TCC, especially Susan Moore and Peter Rauch and President Walt Thirion, who never met an Ethernet he liked.
Walt was in a somewhat jovial mood, for Walt anyway, especially considering his rumored frustration at being contractually obliged to sell to the LAN Group International only. Strangely, I didn’t see many LAN Group members at the party, and caught myself wondering if a terrible schism is in the cards.
Having already had a bit to drink before I got there, I ran around spilling vodka and tonic all over the carpet and loudly proclaiming that ours is a contentious society, and that Ethernet therefore parallels human nature far better than the deterministic token-passing straightjacket. “Humanity’s choice is Ethernet,” I kept yelling, “ARCnet is for aliens!” Something like that.
By this time I was enduring hard stares from the more ferocious-looking ARCnet aficionados, so I hooked up with John Lilywhite of Earth Computers, late of AST Research, and headed for the LAN Times bash in the Khmer Pavilion (only I kept calling it the Khmer Rouge Pavilion and shouted, “Which way to the Killing Fields?” at every doorman I saw along the way). The Khmer Pavilion is a rather capacious ballroom by any definition, which, on this particular evening, was quite empty. Well almost. There were a few people milling about, trying to stand as far from the live band as possible.
This, I learned, was far more than a LAN Times shindig; in fact, McGraw-Hill was putting it on to show off all three of their new toys, LAN Times, NetWare Technical Journal, and Selling Red. I spent most of my time with the editor of one of these august rags, a fellow quite disenchanted with the takeover who intimated that he would not be working for his current employer in two months. Whether he is quitting or getting the sack it simply points up what I’ve said before: McGraw-Hill is gonna kill those books.
But McGraw-Hill’s liquor is as good as anyone else’s, so I hung around a bit, watching Judith Clarke and Craig Burton in loving and nauseating embrace the whole time, until the already meager crowd thinned to such post-stink-bomb levels that I felt rather self-conscious standing there all by myself.
Then I caught my old boss Bradley Morse of Gateway Communications sneaking out of the party and joined him on his way up to the PC Week Spencer F. Katt Slumber Party. I have been to quite a few of these Katt Parties, and you would think I would know better by now, but I keep on going. First thing is, they give you these silly overlong t-shirts at the door, and of course being half- or three-quarters-plastered most of us put the damned things on over our dress shirts, but under our jackets, so we all look like escaped mental patients or extras from a John Carpenter movie. Then you get inside and discover there’s nothing to drink! It’s a Slumber Party, see? So they just serve after-dinner drinks like brandy or Bailey’s. And instead of food they have a lot of chocolate and confections and other such filigree. It’s disgusting.
So I lurched around this suite 27 floors above Dallas, dressed like a mummy with an MBA and swinging a snifter of Cognac around, chatting with the VP International from Network General and a half-Japanese fellow from Hewlett-Packard (I actually know a little Japanese, but I wasn’t gonna try anything on this guy, not in the state I was in then). Eventually, as always happens at these things, the two vicious PC Week stormtrooper girls (a pair of sour-faced young Bostonian Fascists, it’s the same ones every time) hustled us all (or maybe it was just me) out of the suite. I might have yelled something at them through the door in angry frustration, I’m not sure, but at any rate I soon found myself at the CPU Distributing party on the ground floor.
CPU was throwing a casino night, which was a bit of a laugh because what kind of casino makes you pay for your own drinks? Oh, beer and wine were free for those who can stomach the stuff (probably ARCnet weenies left over from the TCC party or real cheap field-support hacks), but everything else cost $3.50, which was only slightly more than what you could pay for it just outside the party in the Kiosk Bar. I met up with a few friends and near-friends and finally settled down into a long conversation with Dick Barkemeijer-De-Wit of Cross Communications. Turns out we have common backgrounds, having both started in the Orange County graphics scene. The $3.50 drinks seemed to have sobered me up and we talked business for a while, until I decided that I wanted to play some blackjack. Alas, as I sat at a table the clock struck midnight, the party was over, and the dealer wouldn’t play with me no matter how I whined and cajoled. So I left.
Periodically throughout the next day (which was rainy and cold), Adam Torres of H.A. Bruno would turn on the InfoMart public address system and boom out, “ATTENTION NETWORLD EXHIBITORS AND ATTENDEES! ATTENTION NETWORLD EXHIBITORS AND ATTENDEES! DON’T FORGET THE BIG NETWORLD BASH TONIGHT AT SIX FLAGS IN ARLINGTON. THE WEATHER IS VERY NICE IN ARLINGTON NOW, AND THE BUSES LEAVE THE INFOMART AT 6:00. BUSES WILL ALSO BE LEAVING FROM MOST OF YOUR HOTELS, etc.,” until most of us were nearly deaf from it. I thought of all those folks who were hosting hospitality suites that night, and how much they must appreciate these thunderous announcements directing everyone’s attention to the amusement park for the evening.
I suppose you now expect a blow-by-blow of the NetWorld Six Flags Bash. Well, this correspondent gave it a little thought and decided that if he were to go to the NetWorld Six Flags Bash and things got a little dull, he would be marooned out in Arlington, Texas, a $40 cab ride from Dallas, at the complete mercy of Novell and H.A. Bruno, until the buses started rolling again. No thanks, thought I.
Instead, I connected with Brendan Mullooly of Mulloolian Algebra fame and also of Amtron Belgium in the Stouffer Hotel bar. After a few cold ones we walked over to the Anatole and had a look at the video monitors which tell you where all the parties are. Carefully avoiding the Computer Associates conventioneers swarming about (I swear it looked like nothing so much as a State Farm insurance agents’ conference), we made our way up to a suite hosted by H.A. Bruno’s arch-competitors, The Interface Group. Well, I don’t really like The Interface Group, but I thought they showed a lot of cheek by throwing a party at NetWorld, deep in Bruno Country as it were. Of course, their suite was dead, since everyone was at Six Flags, so we sat around with these old-worldy Bostonians, drinking beer and eating cheese, and marvelling at the funny accents as the Interfacers told old trade show stories.
Presently, Brendan and I buggered off to the next destination on our list, Cabletron’s suite, which was quite as lifeless as the Interface suite. After borrowing a couple beers off Cabletron, we went back out and ran into Leith Anderson on the mezzanine. We stood around and chatted about Leith’s new magazine, SQL Server, and about whether or not Novell’s SQL Server really works. I’m hoping it does, because we all know how I feel about LAN Manager.
Brendan pulled out the soiled cocktail napkin on which he had written the suite numbers of the night’s parties and said, “Next we try out Netcom.” Netcom Research is relatively new on the scene, a hardware company making waves in the industry with the help of $5 million capital backing and a rumored Ethernet card deal with the LAN Group. Between Netcom and Anthem Electronics, it has oft been said, smaller Ethernet hardware vendors like IMC will be squeezed right out of business. Maybe.
Not much was happening in the Netcom suite either, but at least they were serving something other than beer. Brendan and I sauntered in and I immediately announced myself as a competitor. Then I saw their nifty little diskless LAN workstation on a coffee table and demanded, “Hey, can you open that up? I wanna see inside.” Philip McCarty, Netcom Customer Support Manager, said he didn’t have a screwdriver, whereupon I produced one from a pocket and bade him to have at it. While the marketing communications girl was fixing my drink, I inspected the workstation, which was nice and compact and used surprisingly little surface-mount technology, a feature I considered advantageous for reasons of reliability.
While I was at the bar working on my second drink, LAN Group International General Manager Eric Stral strode in accompanied by several LAN Group members, including Jouni Karvonen of Mikronet in Finland, and Berndt Langstroem of Data Construction in Sweden. They had just returned from Six Flags, where, they said, the weather had turned cold and nasty. Everybody found drinks and seats and the party perked up considerably.
I spent the next half hour or so drawing maps of Los Angeles on cocktail napkins for an old friend, Petri Laakonen of Mikronet, and describing California weather to him in a very loud voice. Then I discovered that Philip went to the same high school as my ex-wife (Laguna Beach High School), and we therefore became instant and inseparable friends, at least for the remainder of the evening. Meanwhile, Brendan had been at the coffee table entertaining Netcom President C. Norman Campbell, who suddenly decided we needed to go to a topless bar he knew about. So Philip, Norm, Brendan and I staggered out of the suite and down to the parking lot and piled into a rented Lincoln. Norm drove us somewhere out towards central Dallas, but the bar was closed, so he then drove us back to the Anatole. Back in the parking lot my belt buckle broke, and this slowed me down considerably. While the Netcom boys went back upstairs and Brendan hailed a taxi, I remained in the lobby of the Anatole, bashing the recalcitrant buckle against an 18th Century Spanish end table in white fury under the horrified gaze of three Anatole doormen.
So much for my adventures at NetWorld. On the last night I drank iced tea in the Stouffer Hotel bar and watched various LAN Group members armed with truncheons, brass knuckles, knives, etc., walk into the back room to work over C. Norman Campbell, presumably for better margins (from time to time Eric Stral would retire to the men’s room to run cold water over his knuckles). After a quick dinner at the new Dallas Hooters (I never did get a good look at what I was eating), I turned in early. In the words of the very mortal Jack Kerouac, I was beat.
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