On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, John Ruschmeyer wrote: Believe me, its easy. Let me demonstrate how it can happen. My company was recently bought out. I was sole keeper of the "Intellectual Property" (i.e. source code). When the company was purchased, the only thing the buyers wanted to see as proof that our product existed was a directory listing of the source code files. For reasons irrelevant to this thread, I never produced the actual source code. I've held onto it. At one point I was asked to submit a copy to someone in the new entity, which I did. It sat undisturbed on the server I uploaded it to. Months later, after the person I'd submitted it to was long gone, when it really counted and the corporate brass wanted a copy, they knew nothing about the copy I'd loaded onto the server (I later deleted it). One of my programmer's was working on an updated version of our primary product. She finished it, archived the source code and supporting documentation onto a Syquest disk (uh oh :) and packaged everything up and shipped it to the corporate office when our office was closed down. She's since left the company and moved out of state. If anyone at corporate ever asked where this source code was they would never find it. I'm the only link to it, but I won't be around forever. As far as they know, a project that consumed 2.5 years and at least $300,000 does not even exist. It's all but lost at this point. So Dayna obviously had something Intel wanted, but apparently it wasn't for their I.P. This goes back to the same issue as how a company can lose the source code to a program they use on a continual basis. If you've never worked for a large corporation then its hard to comprehend how intellectual property can be lost. But believe me, it happens all the time in buyouts and mergers. The guys doing the buying have all the money in the world but no technical knowledge whatsoever. They are buying a big black box that contains all sorts of things. They're usually after just one specific thing in that black box (either one particular product, customers, patents, etc) but they have no specific knowledge of what else is in that box, and they don't care. After the merger, the people who knew what was going on are either downsized or they leave, and the knowledge they had of what was inside the black box goes with them. So your favorite software tool or whatever suddenly becomes unsupported. Or in the extreme case, extinct. And its not just the untangible that gets lost. Even tangible things get lost. Items get stuffed away in closets or storage rooms somewhere in the building and are forgotten about. Large items. Big mini-computers for instance. 10 or 20 years later , after several maganement changes, that room is opened like an ancient tomb and cleared out to make way for new office space or whatnot. Trust me. It happens. As stupid as it sounds, it happens. Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Always being hassled by the man. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 11/02/98]

Now I get it... If you want to corner the market in bathwater, you may have to throw out a few babies. :-) <<<John>>>