No discussion of CES would be complete without a mention of the late love-it-or-hate-it uber tradeshow, Comdex.

Does anyone else feel a tad out of sorts the week before Thanksgiving? Does anybody else miss that humongous flower cornucopia off the Bellagio lobby? Do you miss Spencer the Katt parties or the Micrografx Chili cook-off?

Nope. Didn't think so.

When I first started covering tech and what was then dubbed new media in the early nineties, CES most decidedly took a backseat to Comdex. Comdex was the kingpin, ruling the tech tradeshow roost for some 25 years, growing from a few thousand attendees to some 200,000 at its peak, with a million + square feet of exhibits. There were massive booths devoted to (then) vaporware like Memphis and Bluetooth, legions of booth babes in plunging leopard and sequins flogging software they didn't understand, and throngs of blue-shirted salesmen standing guard over shiny displays.

Eventually, Comdex grew so rambunctiously out of control that the Computer Dealers Expo was virtually unrecognizable.

I remember when AOL sent me and a group of my fellow Greenhouse Partners to CES. It was 1996, the year when The Spot, the first true Internet soap opera with its hot n' hip inhabitants, was all the rage. At the time, I wondered why AOL's powerhouse of baby-faced Harvard B-school grads hadn't sent us to Comdex instead. Now I see that it was the proverbial writing on the wall. As early as 1996, CES was beginning to pop one of Las Vegas' biggest tradeshow bubbles.

In the end, Comdex couldn't quite figure out how to morph its heritage with the evolving Internet and the swift convergence of entertainment-media and technology.

Comdex finally, officially, bit the dust in 2004, leaving the swag and the swagger to CES.