This year's show began like most others. Bill Gates gave an amusing but largely content-free speech to kick off Comdex on Sunday evening. The whimsy was provided by a David Letterman-like "Top 10" list describing why Bill loves his PC. Reason number 6: "I can program in any language I want," was a sly allusion to Microsoft's resistance to Java. Number 5: "I can sit at my PC, collaborate with attorneys all over the world, comment on a 48-page legal brief and send it all to the Department of Justice," touched on the company's on-going antitrust woes. At the business end of his talk, Gates unveiled the company's latest e-mail program, Microsoft Exchange 5.5.

Then Compaq chief executive office Eckhard Pfeiffer had us up bright and early Monday morning with another standard-issue oration. Pfeiffer said that the PC will take on an increasing role running mission-critical applications of the large-scale networked variety, which American corporations rely on for o perating their businesses. Well, we've been warned.

Next, the Comdex faithful tramped around piles of gravel--some 270,000 square feet of exhibit space are being added to the Las Vegas Convention Center--to begin a hard day pounding the conference floor in search of free T-shirts.

I joined them, but didn't expect to find anything particularly interesting. Around lunchtime, much to my surprise, it dawned on me that I had indeed seen a bunch of hot stuff on the show floor. More important, the technology I'd looked at pointed the way to three trends that will drive the computer industry for the next year. Let's take them one at a time:

Electronics is back. As a member of the EE Times family, it's incredibly exciting for me to realize that the computer industry is no longer a monolithic, one-size-fits-all business. For the first time in years, there's a staggering variety of chips and electronics subsystems be ing offered by semiconductor vendors looking to snare design wins in next-generation multimedia PCs and new-age "convergence" computer-cum-television products. One excellent case in point is Cirrus Logic, which showcased a brilliant reference design for a consumer multimedia box that includes a DVD drive, television tuner and Web-browser. It's powered by Cirrus's own multimedia chip sets and Microsoft's upcoming Windows 98 operating system. Cirrus is pitching the design to OEMs and says the bill of materials totals $700, meaning we could see a $1,500 product on store shelves sometime next year.

Windows CE is a winner. The first handheld computers built around Microsoft's Windows CE 1.0 operating system debuted at last year's Comdex to a ho-hum reception. This year, Microsoft has revved up CE 2.0 and vendors like LG Electronics, Philips and Hewlett-Packard have put together heavy-hitting handhelds with features like color displays, modems and usable keyboards. After years of lugging backbreaking laptops on cross-country flights, computer users will now be able to lighten their loads considerably, though they'll have lay in ample supplies of AA batteries.

Flat-panel displays are for real. Thin-film liquid-crystal displays used to be the technology that everybody wrote about but nobody really believed in. At Comdex, Sony and Sharp made a believer out of me. Both companies showed real-world televisions that use either direct-view or projection-LCD technologies to deliver quality pictures in a lightweight package. These products aren't packed with quite as many features as the best of the traditional CRT-equipped televisions, but that should change in short order. So move over, George Jetson, because wall-sized TVs are on the way.

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