Quarter Life Crisis

CeBIT¶

2095 words

You probably know the CeBIT, the world's biggest computer fair which is held in Hannover once a year. It's in spring, so this post has no current reason other than me stumbling over my CeBIT memories earlier today.

The first time I went there must have been in 1987. One of our relatives had free tickets from his company and my dad thought it'd be fun for me. Then he went on a work trip and my mom had to go with me. Small kids can have a lot of patience and stamina when there are zillions of square metres of exciting machines to explore. My mom will happily tell a story about that.

But for me, it was great. I mean the times were great. They had really cool machines there. Such as electric typewriters, say. You could push a button and they'd type a whole page of text. The most memorable 'text' was an ASCII art Snoopy sleeping on his kennel. I kept that piece of paper for years. Other exciting devices were colour copiers. I.e. copiers that had an extra button so they could copy in red. Or green. Judging from the scrap paper I had in later years, I must have put quite a few sample alphabets on these copiers and made 'coloured' copies of those in various magnifications. Fun.

The very best, however, was with what they'd probably call the CAM people. They had a machine where they put a bit of metal in. It made a lot of noise, rotated, drilled, cut, sprayed water on the inside and ten minutes later a cylinder hear (or something) came out. I think it's still in my room at my parents' house. Great stuff.

At that CeBIT I must have also gotten my first telephone card as a present from the Post (now Deutsche Telekom). They were only introducing card phones at the time and it felt quite high-tech and exciting. It had a value of five 'units'. (Those were 20 Pfenning at the time, which meant the card's value rose to DM 1,50 when they raised the price of a unit later one – a 'bug' they eliminated in later revisions. I suppose the card might be worth much more to collectors these days.)

The advantage of those years was that most visitors were actual businesspeople and very few kids were there. So people at the stalls actually liked the change, showed you things and gave you nice stuff. Quite unlike these days, but I'll rant about that in a paragraph or two.

We got tickets quite a few times after that as well. Again, thanks to people working in companies who had their own stall and thus quite a few complimentary tickets to spare. And the following years saw me explore things that were actually computer related.

Like the Atari stall. I was an Atari kid at the time. And that was an innocent time for computing. While there were different models of the Atari ST, the differences were small. I could never actually tell them while I still used it (well, apparently my dad could run 'BigTeX' for more complex macros on his 4MB machine, which I couldn't). All the numbers thrown at people today were completely irrelevant. No megahertz, no transistor count, even RAM sizes didn't matter as long as you could attach a mouse and a joystick to the machine – without needing 'drivers', whatever those were, of course.

Yes, they did exhibit newer machines a the fair. They even had hard drives. Or that TT thing, the significance I which I didn't understand at the time. (I think those were 68030s or so.) But it didn't matter. I didn't care too much. Other highlights included Silicon Graphics who had stunning demos at the time. Peanuts by today's standards, but extremely impressive to an early 1990s teenager.

And then came the Apple time. I had my first hands on experience with a mac at the Apple stall at CeBIT 1993. I was playing with a LC III (IIRC, might have been II) there, with the nice 15" portrait monitor. And I loved it. A fact that I mainly attribute to the fact that the Mac could open more than four Finder windows and use several applications at the same time in retrospect. It looked good. And it felt very good and special. I needed five minutes to close all the windows again.

At another Mac stall they demoed this flight simulator which could run on three displays, giving front, left and right views for the pilot. The first multi-screen computer I saw. And it was a Mac. They even said you simply add graphics cards and bang! – as Steve would say these days – you've got three desktops. I remembered other people at the time sweating to get their computer to display a single desktop on a single screen. And these people were having three of those. Just like that. For a game. I just had to get a Mac.

As luck would have it, I had my own Mac LC III the next year. And I had the Macintosh bible. Read from back to front – no, the other way round. Anyway, a year made quite a difference in my knowledge of the platform.

And, of course, it was March 1994. The introduction of the PowerMacintosh. Excitement. Anticipication. We had read about the PowerPC processor and how it was going to be all new, and RISC and blazingly fast. And we were the to see the goods. And what can I say – Apple didn't fail to disappoint. They had the big story, but those Pentium people stole the show. Sure, we managed to get a glimpse at the machines and boy were they fast. At least the Graphing Calculator was a 'killer app', something I had never seen before and neither beleived possible. In retrospect it was probably the only application that really used the processor's power at the time, that was truely native and had decent performance even on a PowerMac 6100. This was SGI level stuff on a Mac! Adobe also had a Premiere demo on a bigger PowerMac, showing off some real time transitions or so.

That year or the year after I was also to inquire about more specialist things like AtEase for Workgroups and AppleScript – which was hot and new at the time – for my school. And I wasn't impressed at all by what the company had to offer. People just didn't know anything and basically couldn't help me.

Apple may even have not participated in some of the subsequent years. But things became a lot worse anyway. The Windows domination started to be apparent. 80% of the screens at the stalls were displaying Solitaire and the Windows people were starting to invade the show. Bags became bigger and more colourful, shows became louder, the little gifts became crappier. And those people were just going everywhere demanding presents, talking about graphics cards, motherboards, sound cards and other things I didn't care for. Invasion of the brutes.

Having mentioned the bags, I remember that wonderful slogan An ihren Tüten sollt ihr sie erkennen (You shall be able to recognise them by their bags), which differs from some bible quote by a letter (a word in English).

At that time the people running the fair actually decided that this was unbearable and decided to run another 'consumer' show, CeBIT home, later in the year. It didn't help. I'm not even sure CeBIT home still exists.

I still went one or two more times. The last must have been in 1999. The year of the 'smurf' G3. They had pretty cool demos for digital video using FireWire and QuickTime. The presenter pointed out how QuickTime could play MPEG video backwards without problems, which I thought was misguided: This may be a feat for a computer displaying compressed video, but considering the ease with which my VCR performs the same task, I'd hardly call it impressive. I also got a Gandhi Think different poster for a donation to an orphanage and was appalled yet intrigued by the company who offered kits to replace the smurf G3's handles and replaced them by something rack mountable.

On that CeBIT I also visited a small software company (doing FileMaker related stuff) that turned out to be just down the road of my parents' house and checked out some tax-consultant software (Windows) for a tax-consultant I worked for at the time. She used DATEV software. They have a quasi monopoly on that kind of software, so naturally their products are a big stinking heap of crap – and that's a friendly way of putting it.

Naturally their software is Microsoft only and a complete lock-in with Office & co. I was to investigate how or whether certain things could be done with their software and how future developments would be. I actually managed to talk to one of the guys in suits, asking a few questions, like why exactly it takes their software around two minutes to do a database query on a few hundred clients (No that's not a joke, sadly. One possible excuse could have been that their database wasn't a real database, but just flat files. That was the case but couldn't possibly explain abominable performance like that. After all my low-brow reference platform, a Performa 630 running the often sneered-at FileMaker, would respond to a complex query on a few thousand records across a 10Mbit network in less than a second – even while my colleague was working in XPress. So a multi-hundred MHz dedicated server on a 100MBit network...)

As computer salespeople go he was of course right. In the sense that he would 'explain' everything in the way that their product was perfectly good, ignoring details as little as reality. He needed a few more minutes to bury my little plan to switch over their letter-writing to a few TeX templates (to get rid of the Word files that you just couldn save or open anymore later just because they contained a table among many other things). Of course I didn't present the question in this form, but simply asked whether we could integrate our own little apps with their system. Of course he was having none of it, told me about how great Microsoft was, that their system only works with MS Office, that we should be concerned about security which wouldn't be warranted outside of Office (either he truely believed that or he was a very good liar, keeping a straight face and all) and that nobody asked for that anyway. So I told him there was somebody asking for it now, made him take a note and left. Hopeless.

I later saw another company doing similar software. Just much cleaner looking, much easier to use, much less bloated. They were friendly, had drinks and actually tried to sell the product. They were offering a migration plan and around half the annual cost (which is five digit at least) of the other software afterwards. I was all for it, just based on what the software looked like and how I saw the people working in the office struggle with the other one. Of course, thanks to good old FUD, the change never happened. Even the employees refused it quoting that they won't be able to get a job elswhere if they aren't trained on the current version of the 'standard' software. Sickening.

That was the last CeBIT I attended and it doesn't feel like I've missed much. There will be louder music, pimply Quake players, crappy presents and so on. And less information. Less new information in particular. I think the internet changed a lot here. If there's a new product that I'd be interested in, I'll usually know about it within days, if not hours. And there will be more tests and reviews than I could ask for.

All in all this was a funny cycle. When I went to the CeBIT for the first time, we actually visited one of my parents' friends. He worked there. And they had enough leisure to have people visit them and offer them a drink and some biscuits. When I went there the last time, we visited one of my friends who was working there. As it's just over half an hour on the train from Göttingen and pay is rather high, these jobs are quite popular with geeks and girls who are prepared to wear skirts and high heels.

July 24, 2004, 2:52