My own demo career taught me always to look behind the curtain. A couple of years later I was at a meeting of American newspaper editors in San Francisco, whose program included a speech by Larry Ellison, the renowned and ruthless head of the software superpower Oracle. The always-persuasive Ellison was demonstrating his then-newest brainstorm: the so-called “network” computer that contained relatively little software and instead received all its programming over the Internet.

After extolling the virtues of the new computer at length — low cost, constantly updated software, infinite storage ability on the network — Ellison did his demo, prefacing it by saying he was using an ordinary telephone line to connect to the Internet. The demo was dramatic, culminating in a full-motion color video of an Apollo mission blast-off. The audience, of course, was wowed, especially to see such great video coming off a mere telephone line. One tech-savvy person in the audience stood up and asked again if the connection was just a telephone line, and the mogul said yes—this was one of the great strengths of the network computer.

The nation’s newspaper editors went away convinced they had seen the future of computing — none of their home computers could produce video like that. I waited until Ellison left and the auditorium cleared, and then went up on stage where the Oracle techies were taking down the demo. “Great demo,” I said. “Was this really just using a telephone line?”

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“Sort of,” said the techie. “Six paired ISDN lines running at 768K.” (Translation: The hookup was to a phone line as a nitro-fuelled dragster is to a VW bug.)

The demo is so much a part of the tech world that it even figures in a classic programmer’s joke. Bill Gates passes away and at the pearly gates St. Peter tells him that he can choose between going to Heaven or Hell. Gates asks if he can see them both before he decides and St. Peter agrees. First he shows Gates a glimpse of Heaven: a bland, boring suburb of identical tract houses and white-bread inhabitants. Then Hell: an incredible hackers’ paradise equipped with the latest high-speed computers, soda and chip machines at every corner and the hottest software available for free. Gates says, it sounds odd, but I think I’ll take Hell. St. Peter snaps his fingers and suddenly Gates is surrounded by fire and brimstone and a little demon is poking him with a pitchfork. “Wait a minute,” Gates shouts, “where are all the computers?” The little demon looks puzzled for a moment and then smiles. “Ah,” he says, “you must have seen our demo.”

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