Lost In The Sauce At DECworld

S.S. Oceanic, flagship of the official cruise line of Walt Disney World, was one of two liners commandeered by Digital Equipment Corp. for their two-week orgy of chest-thumping and horn-tooting at Boston's World Trade Center.

Effectively combining techniques of mobile warfare, Moonie feasts, and epic theatre, DECworld would have given Walt a chuckle.

George Orwell might have been somewhat less amused by the laser light shows, multimedia events, uniformed guides, and omnipresent video screens.

DECworld TV, piped 24 hours-a-day to video kiosks throughout the site, showed canned product announcements, interviews with users, live coverage of scheduled "events" and DEC music videos featuring otherwise normal DP types shucking, jiving, and high-fiving.

Behind the media blitzkrieg, however, was nothing more sinister than the urge to make more money by selling more computers. DEC hopes to win over $1 billion in additional sales from the $20 million event.

The exhibit floor was segmented by industry, with vendors and users invited to demo their systems on one of 13 islands. Demonstrators were asked not to distribute business cards or product literature.

The brokerage and capital markets sectors of DEC's financial services island included scads of service and application demos. Impressive, yes, but what's the point?

"DEC isn't moving onto the turf of Rich and Micrognosis," insists Don Bracken, DEC's capital markets marketing manager. "The video vendors are coming into the digital world. The needs of customers are migrating."

More specifically, the goal of the exhibit was to demonstrate DEC's ability to make real-time market data feeds available to users within the context of fully functional trading applications.

"In order to do this," says Bracken "we selected two types of real time feeds, Reuters SDS2 -- a page-based service -- and Topic's Lynx -- a record -- based ticker service."

Contel Financial Systems demonstrated Lynx via 9600 bits/second dial-up connection to a satellite downlink in New York. Contel used a Microvax II GPX running Aregon's Vax/IDF -- integrated datafeed -- and Vax/IVS-100 -- international videotex system -- software.

The Reuters SDS2 server, which wasn't online for much of the first day, ran an entirely different application package -- Priceserver -- to handle the 19.2 kilobits/second feed.

Contel's Telerate SOP server demo was canceled due to the impossible logistics of getting a leased line to the exhibit floor on short notice.

Bridge Data's demo, -- with all due respect -- was somewhat underwhelming. A pair of unenthused marketeers held the fort. (All dialogue guaranteed almost verbatim).

Q. What brings you to DECworld?

A. Well, they invited us to come and show the service.

Q. What can Bridge do on DEC that it can't do on IBM?

A. Well, nothing really. In fact, hardly anyone uses DEC to access Bridge. When we go into a DEC shop their systems guys usually say "no way."

Q. Really.

A. Yeah, we usually end up on a stand-alone PC or one of our own terminals.