All of the software I used was readily available on Aminet. A couple of friends of mine did the exact same thing with thier A3000 for the sole purpose of being able to be on IRC at the same time on a single dial-up. The only difference was that the other system they had hooked up to the A3000 was a Mac II-series machine. I loved the flexibility that the Multiface III gave me as far as it's high speed serial ports. Jeff -- Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems: Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

Too bad the author was such a tool about the protocol. I remember that he went out of his way to ensure that no other terminal program could speak zmodem with the freely available versions of DSZ or the Unix and VMS zmodem programs. In particular, he threatened the author of TE/2, a terminal program for OS/2 ca. 1990, with respect to that issue.

At 11:49 PM 2/16/01 +0100, you wrote: Blue Ribbon happily sold out to Microsoft. Keep in mind that a "big" Amiga company was typically smaller than any Microsoft team on a sub-project, so one can hardly cry foul when a product was swallowed never to be heard from again. I'm not aware of any connection between ASDG /Elastic Reality and Microsoft. ASDG sold out to Avid... again, quite willingly. Their products were barely marketed there and languished. I'm not aware of the connection between .CAB and LZX. Did they buy a technology or just hire the person? Another Amiga/Microsoft connection was the RIFF file format, which was IFF with Intel endian. There's also the interesting twist of Microsoft and Amigoid company Hash Enterprises. Microsoft acquired them, tried to work with them and failed, and miraculously disgorged them. Microsoft wanted their animation tools to make idiocies like "Bob" and the dancing paper clip. They live happily today at www.hash.com . The "Martin's Minutes" section of their web site is a true web treasure. See June 14, 2000 #305 for a bit of his story about getting into bed with Microsoft. - John

At 04:31 AM 2/17/01 +0100, Iggy Drougge wrote: 3D software maker Softimage was acquired by Microsoft, managed poorly for several years, then sold to Avid. That's probably the connection you're thinking of. Who was that? - John

Not exactly, SGI owns Alias|Wavefront which is the main competitor to SoftImage. The one main benefit of SoftImage being bought out by Microsoft is it started both companies moving their products to cheaper platforms. -- Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca McCalla Professor (780) 492-4584 Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX) University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada

You bet. Ten years ago the hardware for a typical animation station was around $75,000 (a high end SGI), then you put around $75,000 worth of software on it, for a total or around $150,000. I now teach at a media school, where I have a class of 60 students learning 3D modeling and animation. I need around 30 stations for this class, at $150,000 each that's a significant investment. Moving to a PC based platform at least reduces the hardware costs. Over the past decade the cost of Alias and SoftImage software has also decreased. The concentration on high priced systems is basically how SGI got Alias for a bargin price (this was almost 10 years ago, so its close to on topic). Since the hardware and software were so expensive, very few customers could pay cash for their systems. Alias sold packaged systems, both the hardware and software, and provided financing internally for these system. They basically got greedy and instead of using a third party for customer financing, they did it themselves. When the economy slowed down at the beginning of the 1990s, their customers couldn't make payments, which caused considerable cash flow problems for Alias. They ended up with a lot of returned systems that they couldn't sell. At that time Alias was SGI's largest customer, so SGI would be hit hard if Alias went under. So, they basically stepped in a bought a significant part of Alias and put in their own management team. I bought four 310VGX's at the Alias fire sale, which was actually conducted by SGI. -- Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca McCalla Professor (780) 492-4584 Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX) University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada

similar high volume platform) is desirable since it decreases costs. Higher volume means lower costs. I know that may be upsetting to some people on this list. In many ways SGI has encouraged the movement of highend graphics to PCs by a series of stupid moves through the 1990s. To a certain degree the company has lost direction, not unlike the process DEC went through in its last decade. Through the 1980s and the early 1990s, SGI produced reasonably priced highend graphics workstations. Most of the SGI workstations I purchased in that period were in the $65,000 CDN range (this is the educational price). These were good solid workstations, with about the best graphics performance you could get. The last machine SGI made with this characteristic was the Crimson/RE (which is about 8-10 years ago). To get into a highend SGI now costs around $250,000 for some type of Oynx with reasonable options. This isn't cheap. All the other graphics workstations that SGI produce are outperformed by PC based ones. The Oynx is the only graphics workstation that they produce that can't easily be duplicated elsewhere. Its the only game in town for really high end graphics, but I really hate the price tag (I'm in the process of buying another one now), because the price/performance just isn't there. The earlier SGIs were cheaper because there were a small number of standard configurations that could be mass produced. On the other hand, each Oynx is custom built, so there is no volume advantage. The end result is a high price, and a less reliable product. The last m68k based SGI was the 3000 series, which dates from around 1986. The 310 series was R3000 based, a good ways into their relationship with MIPS. -- Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca McCalla Professor (780) 492-4584 Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX) University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada