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 The barrels of cable began to be unspooled. Teams of volunteers, spaced every few feet, would march a string of cable across the hall. A few ties holding cable were cut and the feeds that would hang down from the ceiling were separated from the main rib.

Then, five cherry pickers started a slow march down the convention floor. At each rib, the cherry pickers descended, then in unison (or some ragged semblance of unison) lifted the cables to the rafters.

Hanging down at intervals were coils of cable. These feeds were left about 16 feet off the ground, high enough to clear the semis coming in the next morning but low enough to reach without a cherry picker.

By 5:30, most of the ribs were successfully up, so I went back to the luxurious Holiday Inn for two hours sleep before I started my day of meetings. The volunteers were still working when I left and would continue to do so for the next two days straight. Getting the cables up was the most time-critical task, but plenty of work still remained. Cables had to be connected to equipment racks, connectors tested, the backbone had to be tested, vendors had a million questions, the Internet link needed to be initialized, and a million other details had to be finished before the show opened on Wednesday.

The volunteers that put in this network are an amazing bunch. Some of the best network managers from all over the country come just to help out. When they are done, they have a complex internetwork up and running and connected to the rest of the global mesh. Three days later, it is torn down.

While the ShowNet is operational, it supports some fairly heavyduty applications. Groups of vendors get together to demonstrate the interoperability of standards such as Frame Relay, SMDS, X.400, SNMP, and many others. In marketing-speak, these are called Solutions Showcases. As you walk through the exhibits on the convention floor, different booths have little signs indicating which showcases they are part of.

The Solutions Showcases are certainly useful as a marketing tool. Lots of users come to the show to see what works and who sells the equipment. However, the showcases are equally important to the engineers that design and make the technology.