ou don't have your egg! You are entitled to an egg!" the cashier urgently informs me. At 8 a.m. on opening day of CeBIT, the massive computer trade show in Hanover, Germany, in just one of the sprawling exhibition halls scattered over more than half a square mile, the kitchen staff is setting out hundreds of identical breakfasts: a hard roll, two small slices of wheat bread, butter and jam and, except in my line, apparently, a soft-boiled egg. A constant stream of show participants enters the restaurant, smoking, talking on cell phones, and pausing to eat.
At CeBIT, Germany is the smoking section. As an estimated 700,000 people flow through the halls checking out the wares of more than 7,200 exhibitors, vendors drive festive little carts through the aisles selling cigarettes. Like all trade shows, CeBIT bristles with giveaways, the most common here being shopping bags to carry all the other pens, handouts, disks and other freebies. Down at the train station, Apple Computer is giving out thousands of tangerines, each with a tiny sticker reading "Think Different."
The spectacle of nearly three-quarters of a million visitors from as far away as Beijing and Santa Monica crowding into a midsized German city to talk about computers is just one of the more visible signs of the explosive technology transition taking place right now in Europe, where the population of Web users is projected to explode from today's 14 million to 56 million by 2001. That beeping you hear is the sound of 373 million Europeans getting ready to go online, and CeBIT, like some Virtual City that materialized in Hanover this week, is here to show them how to do it.
The evidence of this rapid shift is everywhere. The pay phones have keyboards so you can send faxes and check your email. Air travelers can check their email or send and receive faxes between flights at Web terminals in airports, paying only the connection time. Cell phones are used to send and receive text, and as debit cards for making purchases. And everyone wants a PC: Hewlett-Packard's European production facilities were paralzyed with orders last fall after the company made what it thought was a routine arrangement with a Swedish labor union to sell its workers computers at a discount. More than 58,000 union members quickly signed up, tripling the firm's fourth quarter Swedish sales and sending a signal to other manufacturers that Europe's technology gap is evaporating.
And so they come here, camping out in every private home that will make way for guests and booking hotel rooms more than 130 miles away, like one huge beeping organism armed with laptops, beepers and the ever-present cell phones, and ambitions to buy or sell huge quantities of equipment. Thanks to Germany's high-speed rail system, even the farthest flung participants can get to the show efficiently. Airlines have added numerous flights from connecting cities such as Copenhagen and Frankfurt, though the beginnings of an old-fashioned general labor strike in Denmark has complicated the journey to global connectivity for many this week as ticket agents and baggage handlers stage work slowdowns.
Unlike Comdex, its better-known U.S. counterpart, which at less than half the size is far more chaotic, CeBIT is cool, organized and, well, unbelievably vast. Everywhere, there are maps and information stations, coffee stands, food counters, shipping services, and other helpful services. The cashier in Hall 13 even darts behind the food counter to fetch a visitor the missing egg. And while German is the host language, mostly what a visitor hears in Hanover this week is the excited chatter in many languages of people who have seen the future, and want to stay there.
-- Janice Castro
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