One colleague has a walking app on his blackberry and clocked up an average of 18 kms (over 11 miles) each day – and that was just travelling between the many meetings he had. The site is about half a mile long, and you can find that most of the 73,000 visitors are in your way as you try to get from meeting to meeting. electronica is about electronic components and systems and the tools for creating them. (Don’t forget – a Weisswurst (white sausage) with pretzel and sweet mustard, washed down with a beer, is regarded as a mid-morning snack in Munich – so you need a lot of places to top up during the day.) OK, so CES in Vegas claims 2 million sq ft, but that is, I think, for everything, and they are exhibiting a huge range of consumer stuff. And that doesn’t include conference rooms, meeting rooms, and the many restaurants and bars. To house this, electronica used 12 halls of the exhibition centre, each hall 11,000 sq metres (or just under 120,000 sq feet) for a total of 132,000 sq metres (1,420,00 sq feet). The organisers claim 2,700 plus exhibiting companies and 73,000 visitors this year. It was already bursting at the seams, but it had to wait until after Munich moved the airport to a new site to the north of the City in 1992 and turned a chunk of the old airport into a new set of exhibition halls, which opened in 1997, that electronica was able to really take off.Īnd it has taken off with a vengeance. My first contact with electronica was in 1982, when it was already a big show at the central Munich Fairground. It seemed logical to use the new Munich Fairground to launch a fair for the fledging electronics industry. Germany has a long tradition of trade fairs, many dating from the Middle Ages, like the Frankfurt Book Fair, begun soon after Gutenberg developed printing in the middle of the 1400s. If most of this (except the births) means nothing or little to you, you are probably too young to understand.Īnd 1964 was the year that electronica began as a trade fair in Germany. General Douglas McArthur and Cole Porter both died and Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin were both born. China, France and America conducted atom bomb tests, and the second Vatican Council replaced Latin with local languages for Roman Catholic church services. In Russia, Khrushchev was deposed as Soviet leader, and, in Britain, Harold Wilson became Prime Minister. Looking back to the year electronica first took place, 1964 was the year that I Want to Hold Your Hand triggered Beatle-mania (and the Rolling Stones released their first album), US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and the US began ramping up the forces in Viet-Nam. So why have I waited this long to report on it? Mainly because I needed the time to recover and to try to get a perspective on what I saw and heard during three days packed with meetings interspersed with long walks. Electronica, the enormous “trade fair for electronic components, systems, applications and services”, to quote the organisers, was nearly a month ago.
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