Comdex 2000: Reminiscing
All this writing about CES is exciting. Being there reminded me of being at Comdex. I found these old photos of Comdex 2000 and I thought I’d share them for fun.
This picture of Mike with the Ask Jeeves butler makes me smile. I am surprised that Ask Jeeves is still around today. It has been quietly tailing behind Google since that juggernaut took over the scene.
I have no idea who this crayon was trying to promote. The company is probably out of business by now. So many companies were massacred by the Dot Bomb, even if they had nothing to do with the Internet.
Netgear are still around. Obviously this huge inflatable ode to Netgear was more interesting to us than the routers they were promoting back then.
I don’t know if you remember when Microsoft added their “friendly†paper clip to the Office Suite, but I do. Everytime I would start a sentence with the word “To,†it would pop up and tell me that if I’m writing a letter, it could help me. I have NEVER started a letter with the word “To.†I wanted to personally beat up the Paperclip, but they only allowed their Help Genie beat him up. We didn’t need a better animated help feature. We needed to learn how to turn the stupid paperclip off.
This was the year I learned about Linux. Mike knew all about it, but I had never heard of it and the concept of Open Source was even more confusing to me. I found it strangely scary that so many companies were promoting something that was available for free on the Internet. Mike had a copy that he had been playing with, but all I saw were penguins.
Not only did those companies survive the Dot Bomb, they are still working on Linux solutions to this day. Here is a picture of Mike with the Penguin Computing penguin. I remember people standing in line to get Linux Penguin tatoos. I still have a hundred of them in a box downstairs from this show. I also have some bumper stickers that say, “Open Source Is Not A Crime.†I didn’t understand them back then. Now, Open Source makes more sense to me than other software programming models and I’m amazed at how short-sighted I was.