IBM Engineers

William> My point was not really the marketing aspect (although it is William> probably the biggest aspect), but the engineering aspect. As William> someone pointed out, the CDC 6600 does one thing well - William> speed. The same is true for just about any CDC William> mainframe. The things, however, were crap in most other William> aspects. They were not as reliable as IBMs, the operating William> systems were nothing to brag about, ... William> IBM did things fairly properly, even if it did take an army William> of people. Well, that's one point of view. The Cybers weren't just the world's best compute engines by a large margin. They also have excellent I/O performance. Show me another 1965 vintage computer that can support timesharing with 600 active users and excellent interactive response time... (I'm talking about the PLATO system here -- which ran 600 users on a 6400, not even a 6600, though the I/O is the same for either.) As for the OS, personally I prefer clean and straighforward over baroque and insecure. Certainly IBM offered the latter. The OS/360 manual clearly showed a nice security hole (simple user application access to supervisor mode) which still worked quite nicely in OS-VS2 on the 370 in 1977 when I tried it at the U of I. (Hint: EXCP SIO appendage.) Perhaps MS learned about OS security from IBM? paul