RIGHT! You have removable hard drives, as I do, and probably have non-removable PROMs (FLASH-types) as well. Now, what to we call this stuff? Back to my original comment about semantics, other parts of the electronics industry and other industries, are calling the content of CD's and tapes "software" as more and more similarity becomes apparent to the public. Additionally, the legal system has begun to see them in the same way. The devices which define our computers are becoming defined more and more by what we used to call software, though now perhaps we should call it firmware, and yet the simple boundaries I once understood to support these definitions now have become blurred by the movement of what used to be firmware into volatile media and of what used to be "software" into non-volatile media, e.g. the PCMCIA Flash-disks I mentioned. I don't think we'll have to wait long for a situation to arise, in which one links to a site on the web, is fed a download of configuration data which defines how the system on which one's running is to be defined, then reads the code which will be executed on the specifically configured "hardware" environment. Instead of the hardware defining how the software must be configured, the software will define the way in which the hardware addresses its requirements. Dick -----Original Message----- From: Hans Franke <Hans.Franke(a)mch20.sbs.de> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Friday, August 20, 1999 6:08 AM Subject: RE: Article on old software programs (for IBM, Apple, Borland, etc)