The asset auction industry has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the Internet: Every defunct dot-com has leftover assets that must be disposed of in the most expedient way possible, to pay off those peeved creditors. Auctioneers swoop in, assess the spoils left behind, display them online and then sell them to the highest bidder in public auctions. These days in San Francisco, auctions are as common as unemployed HTML coders: On any given weekday, you can bid on used Toshiba laptops, overpriced ergonomic workstations, Foosball tables and, of course, the ubiquitous $700 Herman Miller Aeron chair -- symbol of all dot-com excess -- going for a fraction of its original price if you just know which auctions to attend.

The Quokka auction, however, promised the greatest bounty of them all. Quokka.com -- the broadband sports portal that brought us grainy 2-inch videos of such delightful events such as the Whitbread yacht races and the 2000 Olympics -- managed to burn through nearly $200 million, via an IPO and gullible venture capitalists, before it finally went bankrupt in April. Much of that $200 million, apparently, went toward stuff: Aeron chairs for nearly 300 employees. A $12,000 42-inch plasma flat-screen TV for reception. MiniDV cameras. Servers galore. Herman Miller graphite conference tables. DAT players. Twenty-inch TVs sprouting like daisies. Cavalcades of computers.

On Thursday, all of it was up for grabs -- a total of 1,700 items put on the auction block.

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News of the Quokka auction began circulating at least a week prior to the actual event. I caught mentions of it on two mailing lists, in spam from friends and in a notice in the newspaper. A viewing session for the loot had taken place on Wednesday, and assorted friends had already filed through to gawk at the discarded decadence and report back about the pirate booty to be had. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for the madhouse that greeted me when I arrived at 11 a.m. Thursday at a ballroom of the Marriott Hotel. Judging by the bidding number I was handed -- 1175 -- I was not the first person to the party. Nor was I the last: By the time the auction began, at least 1,800 people were crammed into the room, standing three deep along the walls and spilling out the back doors.

Besides your typical auction attendees, like the middle-aged liquidators who hover like hawks at these events, there were entrepreneurs looking to outfit their start-ups on the cheap, pink-haired hipsters hoping to find an inexpensive digital camera or Aeron chair, geeks eyeing the server equipment and a goodly array of veteran Net types just there for the spectacle. Odd characters materialized -- such as the 20-something in a basketball jersey and assorted gold chains, missing two front teeth, who loudly informed the people in line with him that he was gonna get himself a Palm Pilot and a camera and a TV ("60 inches, dude!") and the shabby old man with a gray beard down to his knees who sat silently behind me like Rip van Winkle. There was the occasional Quokka employee observing the carnage, and what seemed to be a large number of formerly employed dot-commers who didn't have anything else to do with their day. After all, this was free entertainment.

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