Al wrote: You know, I think back to 1984, when I was an avid fan of the Apple II (by then very long in the tooth) and its huge catalog of available freeware and commercial programs and plug-in peripheral and coprocessor boards. I'm not saying I was a huge fan of Apple the company, but I was a fan of the multitude of little companies that had been built around the Apple II. Then the Mac came out, which didn't even have Applesoft BASIC built in (never mind the fact that it lacked Integer BASIC!!! That's a different rant), and had no expansion bus. It wasn't obvious how to even write a program for it... the same way that every Apple II user had typed in at least a couple little BASIC programs. And how could you expand it with no expansion bus? Again, thinking back to 1984, the thought lurking in my mind back then was similar... that Apple saw all these other companies selling software and hardware for the Apple II and had eliminated these possibilities on the Mac. I was being a little pessimistic back then, but not much. I ended up using Macs, and even hacking them a little (in terms of hardware mods and delving into at least a layer or two below the OS top level), but it was never like the hackability of an Apple II. To be fair to the S-100 vs IBM PC world, I never really liked the IBM PC either, but it did have an expansion bus, and did ship with Basic, and there was the "choice" (put in quotes intentionally) between MS-DOS and CP/M-86 and then a few others. I suppose in terms of me hacking micros, there was the "before" of the Apple II and S-100 worlds, and the "after" of the Mac and the IBM PC. In the "before" there were cool magazines like BYTE and Dr. Dobbs about true hardware and software hacking; in the "after" there were not-cool magazines telling businesspeople which software to buy (and rudely they were still called BYTE and Dr. Dobbs). I personally feel that moving thought from "IBM PC or Mac on my desk with no software that I actually wrote and no hardware that I actually hacked" to the "my world I create on the cloud and the web where I can show a schematic of this new code practice oscillator I built from a 1U5 and a 3V$ and a youtube movie of my magic eye blinker" may be an improvement over the current environment. (Just to bring in what I've been hacking this weekend). Tim.