I saw the following on the Internet: THE EVENT: The event was the Texas Technology Fair and Computer Expo. It was sponsored by HALPC (Houston Area League of PC Users). For the Fair they shifted their meeting to Friday. HALPC organized the event and titled it: "Microsoft's NT vs IBM's OS/2 - The Showdown - Which OS is best?". The format was for Microsoft to have a 45 minute show followed by our 45 min show. Then there would be a Q&A. THE TEAM: Ron Kohl organized a band of TEAMers to work the show and they worked hard. Before the show they made sure that all seats had a flyer on the upcoming PSP Technical Interchange and a copy of the OS/2 100 reprint. They also brought in their own machines and set up a test drive center which attracted a lot of attention both before and after the show. More about their other work later. OS/2 Professional sent Terry Kirby down to pass out magazines. They shipped me 4,000 magazines (1,000 each of four issues) that we passed out all day Friday and Saturday. THE CROWD: The room was a little small so there were a lot of folks standing after ALL the seats were filled. HALPC attempted to have more chairs brought in but the hotel wouldn't allow more than the 1,200 already there <*Very Big Grin*>. That's right, there were about 1,300 people at this event. THE SHOW: The show started with the introduction of the participants. Making the introductions was Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle. This was an excellent touch by John Behrman, VP Programs of HALPC. It made sure that the Computer Technology writer for the paper was there to witness the event. The speaker from Microsoft was Doug Davis. He has been with Microsoft for three years and is an Architectural Engineer. THE MICROSOFT NT "demo": The Microsoft presentation was a thirty minute pitch followed by a seven minute demo of NT. His second chart was a copy of our Nice Try ad. He stated Microsoft's belief that NT is *the BEST* client/server environment on the market today..... Well, the audience stirred enough at that 'on the market today' remark that he went to his next chart stating that NT was part of a family of Windows products (ie, it really doesn't matter if this one is on the market yet cause the others are). The demo was all the normal stuff you would show if you didn't have anything else to demo.....the file manager, the animated cursor, etc. The audience responded politely.... THE IBM DEMO Then Mr. Barnes took the stage. He did his normal excellent demo execising every opportunity to point out things that NT couldn't do. David showed the Workplace Shell. He showed DOS compatibility. He showed Windows compatibility. He showed cut, paste, and DDE. He has a very impressive DOS flick file app called POPEYE which he used to show off multitasking and DOS graphics. AND he talked a lot about threads and showed how valuable they are to the average user. He had some real good software motion video clips that he showed and he played some music from the system while running several DOS apps. It was at this point that things could have fallen apart if it weren't for Davids knowledge of the system. The system crashed. He said: "OH NO! David is not a happy camper", and went on to explain that he was using some old device drivers that had caused the failure. While he rebooted he talked about how DOS would just leave you with broken disk files and showed the CHKDSK that fixes that in OS/2. He had enough to say that he got over the reboot and back into the demo without losing the attention of the audience. An interesting aside is that the next day I overheard a guy arguing forcefully with another that IBM planned the crash to demonstrate how good the OS is about recovering. All during the demo which lasted about 45 minutes Ron Kohl's team would throw giveaways to the audience. Dave has this habit of saying "Yeah, I know. Show me Dave, show me". The audience soon learned that if they asked Dave to SHOW THEM the flow of goodies would start. They really got into it. THE QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION: All the interest was in OS/2. There were three questions directly for NT and two of those were pointed questions from OS/2 advocates. There were MANY questions for OS/2. THE AUDIENCE POLL: The program chairman next did a poll of the audience. His questions: How many of you have 386 systems? Most of the 1,300 raised their hand. How many of you plan to buy NT just as soon as it becomes available? There were 5 hands raised. Just 5. Out of 1,300 people, only 5. How many of you plan to buy OS/2 2.1 as soon as possible? IT LOOKED TO ME LIKE HALF THE AUDIENCE RAISED THEIR HAND. But let me just say that at least 400 people voted on this one. The evening was a stunning victory for OS/2. There was talk and shock all over the place the next day about how badly IBM had beaten Microsoft. David Barnes was surrounded by eager questioners for over an hour.