But until the Vax is available at Intel prices and reliablity (the old VS3100's and uVaxII's are getting a bit long in the tooth for joe consumer -- and the disks are now creaky)... What I wanted is a cheap Alpha box at AMD prices. With Open/VMS with a 5 or 10 user limit. Decwindows or CDE on it should be fine. Hell, KDE is free... Add a working posix layer based on the commands in FreeBSD. This would the perfect workstation for me. I wish Compaq would hire me to have them designed and built. I close with a Quote from the former President: "One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there." -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984 Switch Unix for Windows98... and you kind of have today. (Where's K.O. now that we need him... Perhaps Advanced Modular Systems could've done this when they were doing MicroVax, RS6000 and Intel triprocessor architecture server boxes). Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? | Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow? | BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?