History (1993): Never Disappointed Coming Back From Comdex/Fall

Almost all HOD manufacturers unveiled their new products before the show. It was the turn of other storage devices.

Tape cartridges: DEC (20GB) and Tandberg (13GB) react to Exabyte (20GB)

Removable rigid disk drives: the offerings are strengthening, and not only in PCMCIA

Floppy disks: Japanese attack the Floptical

Interfaces: SSA and P1394

Flood M-O disk drives: 384MB in 3.S-inch from MOST; overwriting from Nippon Steel

This year at Comdex/Fall in Las Vegas, from November 15 to 19, the mood wasn’t quite as gloomy as last year. It was no longer always a question of crisis even if recovery is not guaranteed.

Prices appeared to be rather steady and some manufacturers even started to talk about allocations in the 80MB to 240MB range.

From 1992 to 1993, the amount of visitors rose from 145,764 to about 170,000, with 20,355 and 25,000 foreigners respectively. The number of booths also increased, from 2,060 to 2,200, but visiting them was not so tedious since this year’s show was concentrated in only 4 different geographic places: the Las Vegas Convention Center and its annexes, plus 3 hotels, the Hilton, next from the LVCC, the Bally’s and the Sands. The next show will be from November 14 to 18, 1994.

What were the main trends in the computer business? The most significant event was the war between microprocessors, Apple’s and IBM’s PowerPC on one side, Intel’s Pentium on the other, with, on the back stage, the fight between Apple/IBM and Microsoft.

And also an overflow of products, not only storage ones with PCMCIA interfaces, but the powerful rise of multimedia and the success of the PCI bus.

The WW main storage players were there, as usual. Only Quantum was missing except on its distributors’ booths and simply had a suite in a hotel. Aura Associates, even if it was in the catalog, was impossible to find in the Sands. And a certain amount of tenacity was necessary to find Micropolis’ booth at the Bally’s.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 71, published on December 1993.

Note: Last Comdex appears in 2003 exhibition, making the Consumer Electronics Show its replacement in Las Vegas.