Sun SPARCstation 2

At 11:49 PM 2/16/01 +0100, you wrote: Blue Ribbon happily sold out to Microsoft. Keep in mind that a "big" Amiga company was typically smaller than any Microsoft team on a sub-project, so one can hardly cry foul when a product was swallowed never to be heard from again. I'm not aware of any connection between ASDG /Elastic Reality and Microsoft. ASDG sold out to Avid... again, quite willingly. Their products were barely marketed there and languished. I'm not aware of the connection between .CAB and LZX. Did they buy a technology or just hire the person? Another Amiga/Microsoft connection was the RIFF file format, which was IFF with Intel endian. There's also the interesting twist of Microsoft and Amigoid company Hash Enterprises. Microsoft acquired them, tried to work with them and failed, and miraculously disgorged them. Microsoft wanted their animation tools to make idiocies like "Bob" and the dancing paper clip. They live happily today at www.hash.com . The "Martin's Minutes" section of their web site is a true web treasure. See June 14, 2000 #305 for a bit of his story about getting into bed with Microsoft. - John