Witnessing the launch of Fall COMDEX 1996 in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS (JP): Last Monday morning this desert gambling town really felt a little different.

Since early morning the hustle and bustle had been escalating. By eight o'clock cars were lined up at intersections. Outside of the Aladdin Hotel's Theater for the Performing Arts and Casino on the Las Vegas strip, thousands of people queued patiently to hear the keynote speech by "Mr. Hardware" Andy Grove.

It was no coincidence Grove had the honor of officially launching the Fall COMDEX '96 because it was also celebrating the 25th anniversary of the microprocessor revolution which his company, Intel Corp. spearheaded.

After the audience was seated in the huge theater, and everyone given a T-shirt, Jason Chudnofsky, President and CEO of Softbank COMDEX, opened the session by welcoming the crowd. Then Grove appeared in a very theatrical way. He took everyone down microprocessor memory lane, starting with the fact that Intel was once a company that made only memory chips.

He projected microprocessor speed would reach 10 GHz, within 15 years.

For this incredible thing to happen, however, the PC user base has to row rapidly. Therefore, he would like to see people spend more time at their PCs and less in front of their TVs. He said PC entertainment needed to be compelling enough that even seasoned couch potatoes would no longer feel comfortable unless he was somehow using his PC interactively.

As a testimony to the microprocessor revolution, this year's COMDEX was complemented by a museum chronicling each stage of microprocessor history. The museum featured 40 original artifacts from the last 25 years.

Grove's speech was followed Tuesday morning by "Mr.Software" Bill Gates, who said today's kids were so much luckier than his generation because they had access to so much information technology. Although, ironically, his generation developed it.

He predicted the next decade would see more compelling graphical user interface, smaller machines with bigger and flatter displays, voice recognition, digital money, and higher bandwidths.

This year's Fall COMDEX, attended by about 200,000 people, was reportedly the biggest ever.

About 10,000 new products were displayed. Among the most interesting new developments were: the arrival of DVD on the PC, DVD drives, DVD authoring and decoding software, Microsoft Windows CE (Consumer Electronics) 56 KBps modems, multiple CD writers that can be chained and can write up to 100 copies simultaneously, speedier CD writers, new PDAs, bigger monitors capable of 1800 by 1440 resolution, digital cameras, Lotus SmartSuite 97, CorelDRAW! 7.0, screen projectors, motherboards for multiple processors, great sounding and three dimensional PC speakers, 30-bit color scanners, Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices, keyboards of various shapes and feels with and without built-in scanners, high capacity (120 MB) floppy drives that can still read and write on your old 3.5" diskettes, high capacity (8.7 GB) hard disk, video conferencing products and their video cameras, gorgeous multimedia notebooks that could be mistaken for designer handbags, 166 MHz notebooks, RAID-based data storage, and, of course, a slew of internet products.

My favorites so far include Hitachi's new flat panel display. It has a 13.3 active matrix display. Because I always have to look very closely to read the screen, it would be ideal for me. Unfortunately, Hitachi has no plan to come to Indonesia.

The new display panel is sold only in Japan for 400,000 yen, and will be available in the U.S. next year. Well, at that price, I could not afford it anyway.

My two other favorites are from Panasonic. These are there big, 21" display monitor and their PC speakers. Next is IBM's new Aptiva S. All black, the new Pentium PC offers great 3-D displays and sound plus a sleek design. The diskette and CD-ROM drives have been taken out from the CPU box and put on the monitor stand's base. This means the box can be tucked out of sight, making it an attractive household appliance.

I just hope I can bring most of the materials on the plane to Jakarta so I can write more detailed stories about the new hardware and software.

-- Zatni Arbi