At 04:51 PM 10/6/98 -0400, you wrote: Yes, I too believe they were running Linux, not WinNT, although Bruce (no relation) runs an Alpha box company that probably sells a lot of WinNT-based systems. - John

At 09:27 PM 10/6/98 -0400, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote: You're right, it's exactly the kind of long argument that I described in my original message: everybody's fighting over who gets credit for what, what their title was (in a business where people pride themselves on self-generated ridiculous titles for their business cards, or better yet, were never given a particular title because their job was so short-term), who did what, who managed to get the attention of a salivating magazine writer, who believes every word, doesn't fact-check, and happily reprints every word. What the computer press does is truly twisted sometimes. DEC wants to trumpet the fact that Alpha chips "made" Titanic. Red Hat wants everyone to know that Linux was involved, without feeling the need to tell the whole story. Carrera wants credit for making, configuring, and delivering the boxes. The reality is that they use whatever they can use, and it only needs to work for a few months of production, which explains the "too many machines in overheated room" part of the story. They needed WinNT to run the off-the-shelf 3D modeling and rendering programs, they liked Linux so they could compile their custom software and run it on a network. Those boxes did nothing but render and composite for weeks at a time. Digital Domain fired most of those people shortly afterwards - that's life in the computer graphics business. So what does this have to do with classic computers? A relevant lesson to the discussion of who invented what-where, I think. Some say freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press; I say sometimes all you need is a good PR pitch and a gullible reporter. :-) - John