I'll give you Suns, I wasn't thinking clearly. They started going downhill about 1998. HP-9000s are very good, also, but some of the bus architectures are starting to show their age. real IBM stuff is always nice, their big iron concepts seem to percolate down to the midrange RS6ks, and it shows. I managed to crash my Indigo2 once - don't try doing a bunch of things on the machine while patching the software. Nuff said. O2s low end. Should have been dropped in '99. Can't tell you how Octane would work with many disks on both controllers, since the onboard SCSI and network interface (as well as other OBIO) share the same PCI bus behind the XIO Bridge. On the Macs: PIDE is horrible for doing more than one thing at once. Period. NCQ SATA is much better, but still not up to the same level as SCSI or derivitives (FC et al). Reliability suffers, too. G5 is a good design, the 970FX is a good processor and the system layout is close to crossbar. I wish I had one. Unfortunately, that line is being discontinued and I don't think Intel has crossbar in anything lower than Xeon.] Not sure where the hang is in Mac SysX. It's somewhere in the Apple proprietary layers (Finder, Quartz...) Happens to me fairly often. I am well aware that Itanium II is pretty good. I believe I recall, though, that the sequence was Itanium1 (Intel's design) -> Last ship for VAX was 2000, last VAX-VMS was 7.3-1. Itanium II (HP bails them out). What will happen next? HP is getting out of processor design . .