--- Eric Dittman &lt;dittman(a)dittman.net&gt; wrote: True, it's primarily a GUI-based, single-user machine, but I used to do maintenance work over VT220 via "newshell <aux:" while my friends played "Silent Service" on the same machine. Obviously, I had to stick to text-window-based editors, and the like, but they exist (vi, emacs, etc., if "ed" and microemacs that come with the OS aren't adequate). It has no passwording and no concept of file ownership, but you can run a session off a terminal while someone else uses the GUI. Stick that in your Mac/DOS/Windows pipe and smoke it! The pre-2.0 stuff reminds me of old versions of GEM. The later stuff got better, but anyone who has fixated on any GUI preference will probably find even the latest Amiga UI to be "primitive". That's mostly how I used my SPARC5 at work - I could tile four xterms and get lots of stuff done at once - tail a log file in one, edit code and other files in another, create accounts in another and have a spare for whatever machine I needed to get to on the intranet. It didn't matter to me if it was OpenLook or CDE or whatever, as long as I could fix 2x2 text windows of 25x80 chars. Back in the old days, I only had room for two VT100s on my desk so I had a serial switcher (or some of our CiTOH terminals supported two sessions as long as you didn't mind manual refresh). Same concept - don't tie me down to one text input thingy, no matter how it's done. The Amiga passes for that, too. Unlike the Mac, they come with a shell. Unlike Windows, you don't need to use a GUI tool to change trivial parameters. It's precisely these reasons why my favorite OSes include AmigaDOS, UNIX and VMS. -ethan ===== Visit "The Seventh Continent" http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/