From: Richard Erlacher <edick(a)idcomm.com> they the They'd it's the By time it's available for hobbiests maybe. Most of the stable products were ahead of the pack, they had to be the pack was hungry and chasing! Lessee, Alpha, remember the 64 bit cpu that was what 10 years ahead of Itainium and the slow parts were maybe 2 times the speed of the fastest intel part running intel emulation. DLT quantums flagship tape backup... formally a DEC patent and was the TK50 back in the mid 80s when the competition was DC600 and 9080 carts. The RZ series of 3.5" drives were connor electonics but the HDA were DEC technology and design. Those SCSI drives were right on the front edge of SCSI standards that were still emerging. Oh and they were fast as well for their time. Beware the comment that sounds like allways and never, rarely are things really that way. DEC was one of the leaders, while they were selling PDP-8s in the form of DECmates and PDP-11s to people that didnt want or need VAXen. Even those "old" systems were sometimes more modern than the PCs of the moment. If anything else they were more likely to be to be found in use or at least working in the early 21st century. Allison