On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 06:09:19AM -0800, collver@softhome.net wrote:
> Please forgive me for prolonging this thread..

It's only a couple days old.  I hope no one will mind if we discuss it a 
little bit longer.

> Have you ever installed NetBSD on a PC using a terminal that did not have
> line-drawing characters?

see http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/

also note my comment about AlphaBIOS.  The full story is, I had to use 
a failsafe jumper to flash srm firmware onto my Alpha because AlphaBIOS's 
fancy white-on-blue line-drawing interface wouldn't work on any physical 
terminal, xterm, or rxvt I could find.

> I've been hearing that rhetoric for many years now.  Sales don't pronounce
> the PC dead yet!

I really have no idea what the figures are, sales or otherwise.  However, 
I think it's clear that most of the innovation and new investment is 
happening in other areas.  I believe innovation, investment, and consumer 
satisfaction are better pedictors of the future market than current sales.  
I'm fairly confident that further research would show most of the 
businessmen who control the future agree with me.  

This is why it is a Very Good Thing that NetBSD is so well-suited to 
embedded and notPeeCee applications, thanks to its clean design, 
unified code tree and build architecture, and BSD license---as well as 
the specific features I mentioned in my earlier post.  The review we 
are discussing is completely tangential to these issues, which are what 
will really matter in the future.  Blue-and-white installer screens will 
not matter in the future (if they ever mattered at all), because in the 
future there will be no installing.