[Dalrymple]

It seems odd today that as the article points out, Microsoft was so slow to support USB. Win NT4 never supported USB. USB2 was not supported on Win 2000 until the sp4 update.

Does anyone else miss Comdex? It seemed to be highly successful yet nothing really took its place.

[adventured]

> Does anyone else miss Comdex? It seemed to be highly successful yet nothing really took its place.

They all do their own shows now. Back then individual tech companies were often small versus the giants of industry (eg GM, Exxon or GE), so they pooled together under one conference.

Microsoft's sales were under a billion dollars until 1990. Approximately the size of Splunk today, inflation adjusted.

Facebook 2019 is 30 times larger than 1990 Microsoft.

So now you have Salesforce Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, Apple does WWDC and other presentations, Facebook has F8, Microsoft has Ignite among other presentations, AWS has re:Invent and Amazon does various other presentations, Adobe has Summit, Google I/O. And on it goes.

[endorphone]

The web took its place. Those shows allowed vendors to show off their products to buyers and the media, and vendors really did delay their launches until the relevant shows. Now that is entirely unnecessary.

I got a work trip to a COMDEX in Vegas once in the late 90s. Really enjoyed it, but there was absolutely nothing of value gained.

[Lammy]

> Microsoft was so slow to support USB

It's hard to agree with that when there was a version (the first of two) of Windows 95 available with USB support at pretty much exactly the same time this "preview" article was published. They (Win95 OSR2.1 aka Win98 "B" and OSR2.5 aka Win95 "C") were only available to OEMs, sure, but that's still a year and a half before the iMac's debut!

The linked article is the December 1996 issue (so written in November), and while I can't seem to find exact "release" dates for the OEM-only version of Windows, here's an article dated January 6, 1997 that mentions it and its "USB Supplement to OSR2" package: http://brianlivingston.com/windowmanager/archive/cgi-bin/new...

I can't find a source for this part so please forgive me if my memory is flawed, but I remember OSR2 having only USB 1.0 support and not USB 1.1 like Windows 98.

=========================

"The usbsupp.exe driver is located on the Windows 95 OEM Service Release CD-ROMs version 2.1 and 2.5 at drive:\Other\USB Folder (where drive: is the drive letter for your CD drive). If you do not have the CD-ROM available, you can download the driver from the World Wide Web at http://www.microsoft.com/HWDEV/devdes/usbgame.htm. Save the file to a floppy disk or to a temporary location on your C: drive, such as C:\temp.

To install the driver, follow this procedure: - Click the Start button, and then choose Programs and Windows Explorer from the pop-up menus. - The Exploring window is displayed. - Locate the file USBSUPP.EXE and double-click on the icon. - Follow the instructions on the screen to install the driver. - After Windows 95 restarts, you should be able to use USB devices with Windows 95.

The README.TXT file included with the driver contains information on how to uninstall and reinstall the driver, if necessary. It also describes how to consult the Microsoft Knowledge Base for more information on the USB driver."

[paulie_a]

I definitely miss it. I was 15 when I first went after snagging a convention badge "venture capitalist"

The booths were much more fun too. There was one with a guy getting out of a straight jacket while riding a unicycle and pitching the revolutionary product. That I don't remember