I ran across this page whilst surfing... http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/vax1.html Basically, it's Dennis Ritchies notes from their first meeiting with DEC on the VAX 11/780... Classic quote: They talked some about software. It was rather depressing. Most of it will be emulated. (Presumably in a 2MB machine you will still have to tell the assembler how big a symbol table to use.) The system itself will be new, but unimaginative. They did not seem to understand, for example, why or even how the command interpreter should be a separate process and not in the system, and why commands themselves should be processes. They are also still stuck mostly in assembly language. There are companies that are learning about how to write software, but DEC is evidently not one of them. Guess what OS their talking about :) clint