COMDEX

» see comdex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

comdex was a show for people who bought computers by the pallet, and it peaked in 1996, two years before i had a modem at home. the name reached me the way it reached most people outside the trade, as a dateline on news stories every november: announced at comdex, shown at comdex. i never once wondered what the building looked like.

the acronym is computer dealers' exhibition, which is exactly the audience it was built for. the first one ran from 3 to 5 december 1979 at the mgm grand in las vegas with 167 exhibitors and 3,904 attendees, put on by a company called the interface group. one of its organizers was sheldon adelson, who at that point was not yet a casino owner.

the timing was the whole thing. in 1979 the microcomputer was a product with no distribution channel, so the people manufacturing them and the people selling them had nowhere to find each other. comdex was that room. it kept being that room through the entire period when the personal computer went from a hobby to a household appliance, which is why the attendance figures read like a chart of the industry itself.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

by 1996 the november show was pulling two hundred and twenty-five thousand people and 2,337 exhibitors across a city that had to be rearranged around it for the week. in the late eighties the doors had been opened to the general public, which is where the crowd numbers came from and also where the complaints started, because dealers found themselves standing next to consumers buying show specials they would later be expected to support.

adelson sold the interface group's show business to softbank in 1995 for eight hundred and sixty-five million dollars, of which his own share was reported at more than five hundred million. he put that money into las vegas real estate and built the venetian on the site of the sands. the largest computer trade show in america funded a casino, which is a sentence that explains more about the nineties than most retrospectives manage.

~ what it became ~

the decline was not slow. in 2000 apple and microsoft stopped exhibiting, deciding they would rather run their own events and talk to customers directly. the dot-com collapse removed the startups who had been renting the small booths, and after september 2001 the companies still coming stopped paying for floor space at all, taking invitation-only suites in hotels instead, which meant the convention floor emptied while the business carried on upstairs.

softbank sold to key3media in 2001. key3media filed chapter 11 in february 2003 and came out the other side as medialive international. the last las vegas comdex ran from 17 to 20 november 2003 with five hundred exhibitors and forty thousand visitors, roughly a sixth of what the same hall had held seven years earlier. on 24 june 2004 the organizers cancelled that november's show, and the consumer electronics show inherited the week without having to fight for it.

~ the long tail ~

the international editions outlived the american one by a little. gothenburg and sao paulo still ran in 2004, and the final comdex anywhere was a greek show at the athens metropolitan expo from 18 to 20 november 2005. across twenty-six years there had been 185 comdex exhibitions and more than two thirds of them were held outside the united states, which is not how anyone remembers it.

the brand had one more life as a website. united business media ran comdexvirtual in november 2010, an online-only event that drew about five thousand attendees, and repeated it in 2011 and 2012 before letting it go. today comdex.com resolves, and what it resolves to is a welcome page for the interop community on somebody else's conference site. the domain was never abandoned. it was just quietly folded into the estate.

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