W91 USENIX in retrospect

[Brian Kantor]

Not a bad conference, with several interesting papers and a couple of
lively panel discussions, as well as the usual highly-informative
hallway discussions and BOFs, but important things first: the
hospitality suite ratings.  I only went to the suites in the Kempinski
(home of the concrete-slab mattress) hotel.  Of those, I remember
these:

1. IBM research.  Fantastic; the munchies were the same as all the other
suites, but there were lots more of them, and they were always hot.  A
good selection of beers, but it wasn't until the third day that someone
finally realized that Corona is supposed to be served with LIME, not
lemon.  Unfortunately, there were no dark beers.  The toys were nice and
varied nightly.  Good machines with interesting demos; technical people
were always there and seemed to know what they were talking about, and
there were no suits to jump into your wallet.  Fantastic desserts after
the Usenix conference reception (which didn't have any) and a good place
to get free beers instead of buying them at the reception.  The dessert
inspection tool (pen flashlight) was quite handy to avoid dairy-based
confections.  It's amazing what you can put through a luggage-tag
laminating machine.

2. Pencom.  Nice ice cream and beers, build your own sundaes.  I guess they
aren't really selling technical things so there weren't any questions of
that kind to ask, but at least they didn't try to snuggle up into your
pockets as soon as you walked in.  The screwdriver with the auto-retracting
phillips end is still their mainstay trinket, and they had a few
laughing golf-balls.  This time I didn't have the urge to count my
fingers after shaking hands with the reps; they're learning to mellow
out a bit.  Maybe they'd be ok to work for after all.

3. O'Reilly and Associates.  Had a book signing for the new awk and perl
books; crowded as hell but good munchies and beer.  You could buy books
from them there; I heard they weren't selling on the Uniforum showfloor.

4. Cray research.  Minor munchies; ok if you're into fruit, grease and
salt.  Beers were ok, they ran out of "desk-top crays" [apparently a
ceramic coaster] early on, but had lots of nifty balsa airplanes that
were superb for bombing sorties against the sales-droids at the
infomart.  Again, not much in the way of technical people to ask
questions of, but it seemed like a nice place to apply for a job, which
might well have been the reason why they had the suite.  Whoever
changed the sign outside their suite to read "Control Data" wins the
golden cudgel award for subtlety.

I regret to say that the trade show was pretty much of a zero for me
this time - didn't see anything of great interest.  I heard it called
"uniborum" several times.  There didn't seem to be any really
revolutionary new things there, but there were a lot of "me too"
products being demonstrated by booth-boyz and booth-bimbos who really
didn't know much about the product or company.  The sales-droids all
seemed to emit an aura of desperation; times must be harder than I
thought.  Whoever it was with the rap-singer booth-show seemed to be
scaring more people away than attracting them.  Besides the sales
literature on some interesting products and a few neat demos, the major
trinkets were good chocolate from Amdahl and some nifty stash-bottles
from CITA, perfect for hanging your carkeys in when you're swimming or
jogging.  There were some more substantial toys if you went to a bunch
of booths and got stamps in some order - then you got a nerf football
or the like.  Someone was giving away a Miata; I wonder who got it?

Summary: technoids 3, salesdroids 0.  The technical conference was worth
it and the trade show wasn't.  Your mileage may vary.  Especially if you
won the Miata.
	- Brian