Good-bye PC Forum, Hello Demofall Conference

There's something about attending a major conference on a subject that engages you. You get to connect with others of like mind and get a little more obsessive about your obsessions than is generally cool. You get to wear those Spock ears or get into a shouting match over closures or bigendianness vs. littleendianness.

I remember, literally decades ago, when you could attend a few key shows like Comdex and the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco and find out about nearly all the hot new products and technologies in the personal computer sphere. As the PC universe expanded it took more shows, and more specialized shows, to reveal all the must-know stuff. Major hardware and software vendors took to holding their own developer conferences to explain the increasingly complicated mix of technologies they wanted their third-party developers to know about.
But there were always a few key shows that you had to attend if you wanted to get a whiff of what the more distant future might hold. Ben Rosen's PC Forum, later run by Esther Dyson. Stewart Alsop's Demo conference. Movers and shakers went to those conferences and often spoke unguardedly around the pool. Well, the PC Forum is no more. Kaput.
Demo keeps on, but if you're more interested in seeing emerging Java-based products, there's this week's Demofall Conference in San Diego. InfoWorld says it's going to be a big Java show.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 02:17 PM  Permalink