Gone To The Show

You’ve seen the placards along Hwy 70 from time to time:  Gun and Knife Show at Craven County Fairgrounds This Weekend.  Whenever I see these signs, my mind drifts back to Cleveland, Ohio, my home before moving to New Bern.  No, we weren’t in the habit of shooting and stabbing each other there – at least no more so than in most other big cities.  In fact, I don’t recall seeing any signs for gun and knife shows there.  But what we used to regularly have, often at the county fairgrounds, were computer shows.  When I see the Gun & Knife show signs, I’m reminded how much I miss those computer shows, and how much enjoyment I used to get just being amongst all those bits and pieces of electronic gizmos.  There must be some sort of computer pheromone mixed into printed circuit boards to which people like me are drawn. 

I attended my first computer show somewhere back in the early 90s or late 80s.  Home computers were still in their relative infancy, and I had made the acquaintance of an engineer the age of my father who had already caught the bug. He became my mentor.  He agreed to show me how to build my own first computer, and took me under his wing as we went off to my first computer show.  Well that was it; I was hooked.  There was something about being in a large room filled with tables brimming with hard drives, motherboards, memory chips, and video cards.  This was the kid-in-a-candy-store scene for the adult kid in me.  I guess the best parallel I can draw would be to the model railroader show I went to at New Bern high school last year, except those guys even dressed up as train engineers.  The guys at the computer shows just dressed up as geeks, which made them look pretty much like everyone else there.

In those days, there was little to no Internet shopping available.  The computer shows were the one place where you could truly find deals on components and even assembled PCs.  The myriad of vendors would take your order for a custom PC, grab their cordless screwdrivers, duck behind their table with components and cases at the ready, and by the time you had made a lap around the room, there was your computer ready for pickup.  Of course, your operating system was far from properly configured, but money had exchanged hands, and both parties were temporarily happy - at least until the buyer got home, by which time the vendor had departed for locations unknown.

The shows I went to were mostly held at the fairgrounds, but sometimes you’d find them at an armory or a hotel ballroom.  There was usually a pair of fair young maidens in comely attire at the door to take your $5 admission money, after which you melded into the morass of huckster vendors and thick-glassed bargain hunters.  A surprising majority of the vendors in Cleveland were part of some sort of cartel, all of whom spoke with thick eastern European accents - think  Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat.  They were generally uncordial, or at least evidenced an air of general disinterest, and I always suspected that the whole thing was a sham to cover up some far more sinister Russian mafia entanglement.  Or maybe I was just glamorizing the whole scene in my mind to make my attendance seem more adventuresome.  But my suspicions were confirmed to a degree when one of the independent Cleveland newspapers ran an expose in 1999 entitled ‘Comrades in Crime’, which detailed a computer scam perpetrated by a loose network of Russian con artists.

Still, I could no more avoid attending those shows than I could pass up a Dairy Queen mocha moolatte today.  I was drawn like the proverbial moth to the flame.  The fact that I already had a computer had no bearing.  I’d have two; after all, the wife needed her own.  I’d have three; we needed a spare.  My married son needed a machine, so I built him one.  Before long, if you were a brother, sister, relative, or co-worker, you had a machine I had built, often at a bargain, because I had to do something with all those parts I kept buying at all those shows I kept attending.  If this had kept up, I’d probably have been a candidate for one of those intervention reality TV shows today.

So the move to New Bern was probably a good thing on several planes.  I haven’t attended a computer show since.  Of course, the Internet is now like one big computer show, offering even more attractive prices.  But with no basement to store extra machines, motherboards, and hard drives, I have a physical limit impeding me, plus truth be told, today’s machines are so powerful that I’ve lost the constant need to upgrade to whatever is newer and faster.  Maybe it’s old(er) age that is mellowing me, making me content to have a machine that is rock solid stable and dependable, even if there are more attractive offerings in the marketplace.  I suspect my wife hasn’t traded me in for much the same reason.