Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/45



When people ask me to explain how INTEROP is different from other trade shows and conferences, I like to describe it as resembling a circus, but not a zoo. A circus appears to be all chaos, but it is carefully managed chaos. A zoo, on the other hand, puts the animals into cages and lets them do what they want.

Networld—referred to by one wag as "Notworld"—is the trade show equivalent of a zoo. Each little cage has its own independent little show. In some cages, exuberant marketing types reach out to touch you with their brochures. In others, they stand listlessly around. The visitors to Networld stroll from one cage to another, feeding their name tags to the animals, hoping that one of them will do something interesting.

INTEROP, on the other hand, is a show. Granted, there are also cages, but those are a small part of what is going on. There are tutorials, a conference, and, most importantly, a huge, operational network.

When I arrived on Saturday, October, 5, 1991, people were just beginning to descend on San Jose. After checking into the luxurious Holiday Inn, I wandered over to the Fairmont Hotel. In a meeting room, about 50 volunteers, engineers from all over Silicon Valley and from around the world, were gathering.

All were quite bleary-eyed. Most of them had been up all night stringing cable in the Diamond Pavilion, one of the auxiliary exhibit halls being used by INTEROP. This gathering was getting ready for the real work that lay ahead that night: installing the network at the San Jose Convention Center.

All of the vendors (with a couple of minor exceptions like my publisher) were connected to a real operational show network, which in turn was connected to the Internet. This was no coaxial cable down the center of an exhibit hall. The network used over 35 miles of cable and connected 300 vendors together with what one observer estimated would be the equivalent of the components needed to wire a 20-story high-tech skyscraper.