While nearly everyone else on the planet speculated feverishly last week about the path of a giant asteroid possibly headed for Earth, the 548,534 residents of Hanover were bracing for another massive collision: the imminent arrival of more than 600,000 digerati from all over the world at CeBIT. The 12-year-old trade show is now so big it has become the Virtual City of information technology, with 7,205 exhibitors from 59 countries.

Since everything in Lower Saxony that could pass for a hotel room has long since been booked, many business travelers will be reduced to bunking down as far away as Dusseldorf and Berlin and peering at train and bus schedules for a way to take in the weeklong show of the most important new developments in computing, telecommunications and office technology. "It's tantamount to what happens in New Orleans during Mardi Gras," says Roger Jones, the North American economic development representative to Lower Saxony. "The population doubles or triples overnight."

Spun off in 1986 from the Hanover Trade Fair, which itself was established after World War II to help rebuild the German economy, CeBIT grew so fast that by 1996 it attracted three-quarters of a million people and had to be split in two. The subsidiary CeBIT Home, a consumer electronics exhibition, is now staged separately every August. What is it about CeBIT that dwarfs the giant Comdex show that swamps Las Vegas and half a dozen other sprawling technology megashows? German officials say that Hanover is the perfect gathering spot for the globe's leading digital innovators. After all, they say, the sons of this industrious region gave the world such developments as the binary system, the first working calculator and the gramophone. And don't forget Karl Jatho, who they claim made the first successful powered flight in history in Hanover, three months before the Wright Brothers did, or Diederik Pining of nearby Hildesheim, who they say landed in America 19 years before Columbus. Who knew?

From March 19 through March 25, CeBIT (the name is a German acronym meaning global center for office and information technology) will add to that impressive list of milestones a tiny new device that eliminates the need for desktop CPUs, a van with a Web browser in the dashboard, some remarkable new mobile phone developments and numerous advances in computerized design and manufacturing, virtual reality, smart cards, voice technology, electronic home shopping, digital banking and cryptography. Among them:

NETWORK COMPUTING

As office-computing needs grow more complex, businesses are increasingly interested in the notion of investing in one very smart central brain that can support a host of simple and inexpensive individual computers. Some 458 separate exhibitors at CeBIT are offering solutions to one of the most vexing problems facing IT departments in practically every company: They pay plenty to put power on every employee's desktop, and even more to send tech teams running to update every piece of software, one user at a time, and to maintain a diverse inventory of complex desktops.

Partnering with Microsoft and industry giant Intel, Network Computing Devices, Inc. of Beaverton, Oregon has developed the new "Thin Star" to put the power (and the investment) back in the central network computer. Says NCD chief executive Bob Gilbertson: "There is no reason to transport all that hardware to the desktop when everything can run more efficiently off the server." Just 20 by 25 cm across and 2.5 cm thick, the device replaces the individual CPU, connecting employee keyboards and monitors directly to the central server via a standard LAN line.

CELL PHONES

Americans accustomed to using cell phones mainly to gab and check voice mail might be astonished by the far broader use of the technology in Europe, where cell phones with enhanced screen displays are used to send and receive E-mail and faxes, surf the Web and charge purchases. Europe's 50 million users are expected to nearly triple to 140 million within five years. In Finland, where almost half the residents own cell phones, people use them as debit devices for such impulse purchases as buying a soda from a vending machine or playing tunes on a digitally-enhanced jukebox.

Telecom Italia is developing the "baby telefonino" for small children, featuring large colored buttons. After all, in the hard-charging '90s, a toddler has to know how to get hold of Mom. Nokia, based in Finland, already offers the Nokia 9000i Communicator, which combines the features of a notebook computer and a cell phone, and is preparing to launch a phone with eight hours of talking time and 18 days of standby power between charges. Even so, Nokia promises to reveal "revolutionary" developments at CeBIT. What, pray tell? A cell phone as microwave oven?

E-COMMERCE

What a difference secure transactions make. Already humming along at some $11 billion a year, global internet commerce is projected to mushroom to a stunning $223 billion annually in the next three years, $30 billion of that in Europe alone, as the population of Web users on the Continent quadruples from 14 million to 56 million and consumer confidence in secure Web transactions grows. By 2001 an estimated 68 million Internet shoppers around the world will be buying everything from books, clothes and records to flowers, air tickets and cars.

At CeBIT, thousands of products, from companies as large as IBM (occupying 4,000 square m of floor space at the show) and as small as a flock of startups selling encryption software, will be showing off the security features that are helping fuel the growth of Web transactions. Example: an Israeli company named Aliroo (the Hebrew name means both "they cannot see" and "they do not fear"), whose founders have military and intelligence backgrounds, will demonstrate a new fax encryption technology.

IBM will showcase its network community solution, which enables home users to access local public services, check the movie schedule downtown, pay bills and order their groceries delivered online. Many other exhibitors will be talking directly to business: Forrester Research, a U.S. firm, projects that global business-to-business E-commerce will grow from 1997 levels of $8 billion to $327 billion by 2002, thanks to the dramatically lower costs and processing time and superior information flow on the Web.

ROAD TRIP!

It had to happen. Millions of people spend as much time commuting these days as they do online. If you've got to be trapped in your car, why not stay connected to the rest of the world? IBM is giving new meaning to the term mobile computing at CeBIT, where it is unveiling a van, developed with the help of Sun Microsystems, Delphi Delco Electronic Systems and Netscape. The Network Vehicle features a voice-activated Web browser, telephone, television and video game player in the dashboard. Add global positioning satellite technology with a liquid crystal "heads-up" display on the windshield similar to those used by fighter pilots, and drivers can sit back, talk to a vehicle with a larger vocabulary than most of their relatives, check E-mail and enjoy other features of this "rolling communications/entertainment center"--while, one hopes, keeping both hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. "It's new age," says IBM spokesperson Cary Ziter, "but it's coming."

With reporting by MICHAEL GOLDFARB/New York