[13] If you're selling, I'm buying...

 I've read tales of the great "computer faires" of the 1970s, where the long-haired, hippy computer folk would get together to show off the latest and greatest, interface, and procure new toys.

Okay, so this picture is from 1982, but still, a time to be treasured.

All the industry greats were there, from the small mom & pop companies, to the mega-(for the time)-retailers, to the media.

Famously, it was at one of these that Bill Gates had his BASIC interpreter for the MITS computer stolen, copied, and distributed so widely that it prompted him to write the famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists":

This was BEFORE he was worth trillions of dollars

And a great social and cooperative time was had by all.

By the time I was old enough, they had evolved.  Gone were most of the manufacturers, the inventors, and the pundits, the "computer show" was usually just an indoor flea market of products. Not that this was such a bad thing, mind you, because this was in the days before eBay.  So, now there would be mostly two categories of vendors, the generic imported Asian-made components, sold without packaging and often without English-language instructions, and the software, either libraries of shareware disks or box after box of commercial releases.  Oh, there were so many under-the-table and less-than-legitimate offerings to be found, but it was one of the best ways to discover what was new and improved in the industry!  You might have seen a blurb in a magazine a few months after a new item came out, but now you could see them in person.

The tables of parts often looked like this

It was at these shows that I got many upgrades for my system, and at first, with the help of Grandpa, and later on my own, I would make little changes that would bring my computer closer to being modern, but still always one step behind, because we weren't rich.  I added a 3.5" drive to my XT, and that system had to last me a long while, because I never got an AT.  When I finally got a 386, I would eventually add a CD-ROM drive, upgrade the graphics to SVGA (but still never larger than a 14" monitor, which probably weighed as much as me), and a SoundBlaster, which made games much more tolerable.  But I still had a slower system, so when I got my hands on the newest games, often they barely functioned.

This cutscene took about 2 hours to view

For example, in the game Leisure Suit Larry 5, at the end of the game, there's a cutscene where a character crosses the screen from the left to the right, and then performs an action (yes, I'm not spoiling a 31-year-old game).  I started the view the scene, mom called me in to dinner, and when I came back, the character was still walking across.  Guess I really shouldn't have tried to play that on a souped-up XT.

Later on, when I was 16, an older high school classmate started a company to sell computers, and we would occasionally take a table at one of these shows and hawk our wares.  We had little signage, no uniforms, and inconsistent product offerings, so we fit in just perfect.

One time, I decided to get us into the Shareware game.  At the time, Wolfenstein 3D and its successor, DOOM, were extremely popular.  People had figured out the file format for Wolf3D, so they created new skins and levels for the game.  

Fans had started modifying Wolfenstein 3D to make their own levels and art almost as soon as it came out, but id had never intended for that to happen and so Wolfenstein 3D modding had involved a convoluted process of data extraction and editing.

With DOOM, id came prepared. ‘We immediately put the data format of the maps up so people could write their own editors,’ Romero says. DOOM thus spawned a thriving cottage industry not only of mapmakers and modders but also of modding toolmakers – many of whom sold their tools as shareware.  - From Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet by Robert Moss.   An excerpt is available online here.

So, I took one of the most popular mods, Barneystein 3D, printed labels, copied a whole lot of disks, and we sold it.  We also set up a computer to demo it, and ran it like an arcade machine -- 25¢ to play for a few minutes.  We ran out of copies really early, and I had to buy a stack of blank disks from another vendor and copy more in the background just to keep up.

You can play it online at the Internet Archive

We also abused our tax resale certificate to purchase stuff from other vendors tax free, pretending it was for a system we were building for our customers, but it was really for ourselves.  Although, half the vendors wouldn't charge sales tax on cash sales anyways, they hid those transactions under the table.

Eight years ago, I saw an advertisement for a computer show near where I lived at the time.  I went there, hoping to relive some of the nostalgia, the great times I had had with my grandfather and the cool toys we bought.  I arrived, but unlike the past, there was no line.  Twenty years earlier, the line to get in would often stretch hundreds of feet away from the building.  This wasn't a good sign.

Inside, I found maybe a dozen vendors, all past their prime and offering mostly junk, and tech items I could get for a dollar shipped on eBay.  And so much stuff wasn't computer-related, it was just unlabeled tech goods, like LED flashlights and headphones.  The glory days had gone, another memory from childhood I can never relive again.

Oddly, while preparing to write this post, I found only a couple of other articles about this.  The first one actually references the second one.  I also found an article from 1994 about one of the main promoters of these shows we went to.