Demo Night consisted of a dozen or so companies showing off their wares for the attendees and others from the AFRL. There was a constant strem of people, as the demo also coincided with the buffet.

MagWeb.com was the center of activity--not necessarily for the better. At one point in time, no less than six techies from the AFRL surrounded the display area trying to patch my laptop into the network so that I could get out to the Internet. As you can imagine, making sure the software and hardware agreed was no easy matter because of all the security systems in place. It took the better part of an hour before everything was up and running--and only because they ended up providing a computer themselves, running cables, and doing all sorts of gyrations to put in a secure line to the internet. Hey, not everyone is running the latest and greatest version of Windows! My laptop runs just fine without it, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it...

Anyway, give them credit for flexibility and ingenuity, but next time, I think I'll have them provide the computer (as Maxwell AFB did) or maybe I'll demo MagWeb.com as a puppet show.

On the other hand, I had a 46" plasma display to show MagWeb.com on, and man o man, that's a heckuva impressive way to view the archive. And it was an ultra fast network-to-T3 connection, so articles just didn't pop on the screen, they burst on the screen. The only faster way to see the archive is to run it off a hard drive!

Other products were a 3D scuba diving simulation (for SEAL training), Air War over Iran game, some 3D jet fighter graphic you could flip up down and around and then push into position in a "box" to look at missile trajectories and kill radii, some traditional hex-based computer wargames, the Marine Corps air-land-sea war simulator (worst graphics you have ever seen in a modern game -- something like the old Atari or Apple II graphics), and a few others I forgot.

Since this took place in an even more secure building than the one with the lectures, it came as no surprise there was a bit of a security "breach" that brought down a number of AFRL security folks to the gathering. Someone who worked at AFRL was saying goodbye to another worker and either shooting the breeze or asking a critical question, but one was outside while the other was inside propping open the door for conversation. That set off an alarm and flashing lights, and that set off a bit of attention, not to mention a "who are all these people in our computer bays?" fro security. Gee, don't you guys read the memos...It was all sorted out in about 10 seconds, but it was exciting.

More Connections 2003

Welcome and Introduction
Lecture: Modeling the Impacts of Information (Jim Dunnigan)
Lecture: Weapons of Mass Destruction Scenarios for Homeland Security (Lt. Roger Mason)
Lecture: Progress in Modelling Cascading Effects (Dr. Steve Rinaldi)
Demo Night
Game Night: Peloponesian War

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