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Well, if you hypothetically eliminated BASIC, you wouldn't just change Microsoft, you would change the entire '70s computer industry. There is a certain joy in supposing that Microsoft (a minor embedded-systems and assembly-language development company) didn't survive the "commodity computer wars" of the early to mid 80's. Who's to say that someone else wouldn't be just as nasty, though? Let's be generous and say that everything else worked out pretty much the same way (including _Dr. Dobbs_, the beginning of the personal-computer movement, and the "languages for everbody" mentality). I think Microsoft would have found something else to do. There were other computer languages they could have ripped off (even sitting on their own PDP-10 system). There were even other SIMPLE languages they could have used. Frankly, though, the idea of Microsoft Visual JOSS *does* scare me a little. -- Derek