In the last half of the twentieth century, at a certain point when radios and TVs were supplanted with all manner of transistorized marvels a "Consumer Electronics Show" (CES) emerged and was THE place to see the modern marvels hi tech had wrought. But not all of these fancy electronics were for consumers at at a point around where the disk drive industry was spinning up (pun very much intended) the National Computer Conference" (NCC) emerges to supplant the CES. NCC was disk drives and chips and circuits and little or no consumer electronics: boom boxes would be at CES. Consumer computers (Amiga, Atari etc) would be at CES but at its inception there were no consumer level computer show CES was born. For those who found NCC to be "too generalized" for example, the graphics industry, they could have a separate conference just about graphics - the IEEE ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH)_ which was more of a technical conferences primarily but of course the trade showed exhibits pay for most of this, they're an inevitability.

What does this have to do with the CNE? Last night ion the way top the Neil Young concert at the Budweiser Underwatertheatre I had a quick and look at the home show and thought nothing of it until this morning. Where is the tech equivalent?

The CNS houses agricultural fairs in the winter, to showcase thew peak of Canadian agriculture. The home show was added to show off new labor saving devices and other hi tech wonders. But does it really make sense to have a hall of eyeglasses and fudge when some not insignificant fraction of everyone's budget now is high tech ?

Would it be unreasonable fore thew CNS to establish a Tech Show as an adjust foot hey Home Show. One might argue we don't do enough tech here in Canada to warrant this. Could it also be that the lack of this is holding back tech in Canada? Those national conferences, now deprecated somewhat as the advances in tech are evolutionary now; back in the day it was revolutionary and an expanding market, and now it's just tech ops business as usual and kind of boring. But CES. NCC, SIGGRAH do in fact pretty much give all attendees a quantum step up; things happen, money changes hands; tech spreads. You can't buy this stuff in stores and being able hear and to talk to luminaries does, actually handle the thing you looked at on Temu - it makes a difference and things happen around conferences and exhibitions and happen fast..

Why is Toronto/Ontario/Canada missing out on this? It's true we don't have the oompf to pull off something like CES but we have all these empty halls at he CNS, the lack of this sems to me now in retrospect to be a an oversight.