> Wintel hardware.. but wasn't it the same in the eighties? I thought
> VMS was for the minicomputers what Windows is for today's PC's.

There are critical differences: VMS worked, for instance. VMS is very 
very stable and powerful. Windows can't even keep itself from crashing 
when you justleave it sitting there idle for a while! VMS was moderately 
efficient on machine resources. windows certainly isn't. VMS was not a 
mass-market item like PeeCees were/are. There _are_ plenty of parallels, 
but i;'d say the differences are greater. Plus, in the 80s, there were 
only maybe 200 thousand VAXen installed. 

> You had a VAX, you almost always had to run VMS on it. Today, 
> you have a PC, you almost always have to run Windows on it. 
> What hardware did the real gurus want to use in the 80's? Honeywell's
> Multics stuff? Univac systems?

nope. VAXen. At least in the US, the VAX was _the_ machine of choice for 
hackers. on their VAXen, there was UNIX. UNIX grew up on PDPs and VAXen 
and until the late 80s, all the important UNIX development happened first
on VAXen. 

The VAX was supreme then, and it still is today- the most beautiful 
architecture! 

Isildur