Rumor has it that David V. Corbin may have mentioned these words: Danger, Will Robinson!!! ;-) *Everything* extreme is off-base to someone (quite often to a large installed base of someones!) That's human nature. (BTW, I'm not denigrating or disagreeing with what you stated -- I'm reinforcing it.) I disagree. I do think it would have been more difficult, but it by no means would have been impossible. Noper -- look at game consoles. Granted, some are a bit more popular than others, but there are still 3 main (and mainstream) platforms to choose from, all of which are incompatible with each other (and sometimes with themselves! ;-) ). and the tech, manpower & most importantly finances to jam said inferior platform down everyone's throat. From IBM, it was by no means even reasonably affordable. (When I worked for GM/EDS on "da big iron" I was vacillating between purchasing an IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 w/30Meg HD and a <mumble> Color Macintosh <mumble>[1] -- neither of which I could afford, even on GM's plans. I bought a 386SX16 clone with 2x memory, 2x HD, better video, better monitor (which was actually OEMmed by IBM anyway, believe it or not) at .5x the price.) That's why Goatway, Hewlett Putrid & Hell computers are king, not IBM. (Compaq used to be king... where are they now?) When IBM said "You buy our PCs for your company, or you'll lose the lease for that IBM 3090..." What do you think those companies did? That clone I purchased above, I bought for 1 reason: Games. It was an $1800 Nintendo. When I wanted to do *real* work, I sparked up my CoCo, as I could do more work in less time under OS-9. In 512K, sans HD, on a <2Mhz CPU, I could run a telecommunication software in one window, my spreadsheet in a second, word processor in a 3rd, Basic09 in a fourth, keep one window just at the prompt in case I needed it, and *still* had room for a 200K RamDrive. I didn't have a snowballs chance in Hades of doing *anything* like that with my IBM. Erm, it's well known he *bought* that. He did *not* develop it. The last thing BG worked on himself was the OS for the Tandy Model 'T' (Kyocera OEMmed) series of laptops. And that was back when Micro$haft still knew how to make decent software, instead of buy crap & selling it to IBM. Yea, and judging from *my* margins, you're one helluva lot better of if you're a customer instead of a vendor... Unless you're name's Michael Dell, you won't get rich selling PCs in your hometown anymore... Gee, thanks for yelling. Just when I thought you were going to keep a logical, professional slant to your (up until now) well-thought-out missive. Sad, really. Regards, Roger Merchberger [1] I'm not denigrating said Macs -- I *really* wanted one. I just don't remember the model #s I was looking at buying - hence the <mumble>. -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein zmerch(a)30below.com |