Well, it was certainly a unique Comdex.  Due to some wacky politics
that I can't go into here, neither Microsoft, nor any of the Linux
distributions (except Caldera, who was pushing their Linux-on-SCO
stuff more heavily, AFAICT), nor BSDI showed up at all.  It was rather
hard to find other operating system software.

We did get a lot of attention, though -- and in particular several
nibbles from people interested in doing embedded work (and, though I
won't name names, some of them may have shown up on our mailing lists
already).  Much literature was distributed (I almost ran out), etc.
The results look fairly positive so far.

Other interesting things that coincided with Comdex:

* Wind River Systems (purveyors of VxWorks, which used to be THE
  embedded OS, but is rapidly losing market share to systems without
  per-unit royalties) has announced they're buying BSDI -- which of
  course includes Walnut Creek, historically FreeBSD's sugar daddy.
  It's not immediately clear what this means to us, but I'm sure the
  next year will be... interesting.  I'm told there's at least one
  article that ponders why they didn't pick up NetBSD (given that it
  already runs on `everything'), but I haven't actually gotten a
  reference to it yet.

* Agenda Computing announced their VR3 `Linux-based' palmtop.  The
  hardware in it is similar to a hpcmips box, and should easily be
  able to run NetBSD.  Apparently they've already gotten nibbles from
  people interested in porting NetBSD to it.  They seemed fairly
  receptive to a port when I talked with them, so we'll see what
  happens.  They say all of their application software is open source.

As in Vegas, the cube was a big hit, especially with the flat-panel
display that erh loaned me for a couple of days.  Next time (if there
*is* a next time; see below) I will try to bring a couple of new and
interesting toys.  Given the decreasing price of the flat-panels, it
could actually be worthwhile to buy a couple to use for display
purposes -- given more resources, anyway.


Thanks go to erh for his assistance (mostly with movein/out, and for
the LCD display), to an anonymous old fart (for lugging a monitor for
me), and to Key3Media for their assistance.  Absolutely NO thanks go
to Certain Other Parties who made movein/out more difficult and more
expensive, but shall remain nameless due to fear of retribution.


As for the future of NetBSD on the convention circuit, that's unclear
to me.

I don't particularly mind going to the conferences, and especially
when talking to embedded developers, it's very useful for someone with
my experience to be there.

However, so far -- except for actual booth space (and I don't mean
furniture and whatnot, I mean the physical space) -- almost all of the
expenses for this have come out of my own pocket.  This cannot and
will not continue.  Unless some way is found (donations, grants,
whatever) to diffuse the cost, it is unlikely that I will be running
any more trade show appearances.  I simply cannot afford to both spend
the time and pay the expenses myself.