OpenVMS still comes with development tools. You can write primitive interpretive code using DCL and more sophisticated stuff with TPU. The file management system RMS also comes free with VMS. Besides the above, there are many shareware or freeware development tools that can be used with VMS. For the private user, VMS can be free and comes with free C/C++, BASIC, Fortran, Perl and other compilers. How does BeOS compare with that? Blue PowerHouse consultant Rhode Island, USA Disclaimer: The opinions and ideas expressed in this message are my own and have no relationship to my current employer, Initial Technical Staffing, its client CCI, or any of CCI's clients. -----Original Message----- From: Jim Strickland [mailto:jim@calico.litterbox.com] Sent: Friday, June 18, 1999 3:58 PM To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers Subject: OT -mostly - After playing with BeOS a while something occurred to me. Does anyone remember at what point operating systems stopped coming with development tools? I'm remembering the commodore 64 that came with Basic, and if you typed in the assembler from the manual, you could (at least in theory) write proffessional quality assembly language programs worthy of being sold to others. Compare this to modern OSs - windows, macos, etc where the development package costs hundreds or thousands of dollars extra. (small plug - BeOS comes with (theoretically) all the tools you need to do development on it.) -- Jim Strickland jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BeOS Powered! -----------------------------------------------------------------------