In June of 1990 my employer sent me to the USENIX conference in Anaheim California where I got to attend technical classes, seminars, training sessions and wander the exhibit/show floor checking out the various UNIX vendor offerings.
True to my geek status, I was honestly more interested in bits, bytes, server capacity and latency than any of the booth babes (of whom there were many). This being 1990, the booth babe army did not yet include certain hot looking guys (that started happening post 1998, and they are still in the minority).
The sexiest thangs on the showroom floor were NeXT cubes, IBM AIX workstations (some running Nextstep as a demo), and some amazingly slick geographic workstations from Intergraph. Here's the confession part...
Most of the vendors had booth babes, and most of the both babes were completely clueless about the technology gadgets and servers and workstations they were pushing... That is factually true and thousands of attending engineers will back me up on this... However, it does not excuse my presumption that the exceptionally hot looking women pushing the Intergraph workstations were simply booth babes too.
In fact, Intergraph's booth was staffed by brilliant engineers; and they did not have a single clueless marketing type at the show at all.... The engineers just happened to be distractingly stunning, and gracious... they allowed me enough time to extract my foot, calf, knee and even thigh after I put them all in my own mouth asking for someone who could talk to me about the technical aspects of the Clipper chip and how CLIX (their OS) differed from AIX and HP-UX. The engineers were part of the team who'd just ported CLIX to Clipper from MIPS. Doh!
Confession time...
True to my geek status, I was honestly more interested in bits, bytes, server capacity and latency than any of the booth babes (of whom there were many). This being 1990, the booth babe army did not yet include certain hot looking guys (that started happening post 1998, and they are still in the minority).
The sexiest thangs on the showroom floor were NeXT cubes, IBM AIX workstations (some running Nextstep as a demo), and some amazingly slick geographic workstations from Intergraph. Here's the confession part...
Most of the vendors had booth babes, and most of the both babes were completely clueless about the technology gadgets and servers and workstations they were pushing... That is factually true and thousands of attending engineers will back me up on this... However, it does not excuse my presumption that the exceptionally hot looking women pushing the Intergraph workstations were simply booth babes too.
In fact, Intergraph's booth was staffed by brilliant engineers; and they did not have a single clueless marketing type at the show at all.... The engineers just happened to be distractingly stunning, and gracious... they allowed me enough time to extract my foot, calf, knee and even thigh after I put them all in my own mouth asking for someone who could talk to me about the technical aspects of the Clipper chip and how CLIX (their OS) differed from AIX and HP-UX. The engineers were part of the team who'd just ported CLIX to Clipper from MIPS. Doh!
Guilty, but I learned a valuable lesson.