After I said:

>> Anyway, IT-21 is not something that is still in the debate stage;
>> I believe it's about as done a deal as anything can get in DOD IT:

Roy came back:

> The most powerful argument against this is probably only one page
> long:  Bill Watterson's 'Calvin and Hobbes' cartoon ....

> Post that somewhere and watch IT-21 unravel :-)

The "Calvin and Hobbes" point is a good one.....    ;-)    .... and if
you look at some of the hits Altavista finds for "IT-21" you will see
that the "ATM to the desktop" part of it has already been delayed /
deferred.  But here is another indication that the Navy (and probably
all of DOD) is very serious about standardizing on MS NT as much
as possible:

Some of y'all may have seen an item on the nightly news here some
weeks ago (or was it months ago already);  where one of the Navy's
newest cruisers went at least temporarily dead in the water off the
Virginia coast.  As I understand it (all I know about it is what I saw
on TV) there was a NT workstation somewhere in the critical path
control loop for the ship's propulsion system.  That NT box suffered the
"blue screen of death" or whatever;  causing the "all stop" condition.

You may need to know a little about how important propulsion system
reliability has been to the Navy to fully appreciate the significance of
senior managers being willing to put NT in a critical-path control loop
on a cruiser....  If they can put it on a cruiser, any argument about
whether or not NT can or should be used for the designated IT-21
functions at any and all shore activities was over *long* ago....

... like I said:  don't shoot the messenger;  but like it or not, that is
the message....

Ken Sletten