Zelik writes:

> Tom
>  That's precisely what I was attempting to convey to this community !!!

And that's also what I was trying to emphasize to the community as well. In
five years, Zelik will represent a market that will evaporate if the emulator
is built. It's a one-time seller's market. There won't be any follow-on
business, thus it will have all of the characteristics of Y2K consulting.
While these few people would be willing to pay almost anything rather than
pay the costs of migration, if the emulator and the MPE license are priced to
extract a "pound of flesh" from these people, in the best tradition of
lawyers, then MPE dies when the last one of this group purchases MPE and the
emulator.

We can do better than that. I think that there is a real potentiality of MPE
becoming a very popular operating system, if it can make its case vis-a-vis
Linux.

But worse, the "homesteader" market doesn't really need an emulator. Used,
high-quality machinery will flood the market shortly as the non-homesteaders
leave. Buying this equipment will be a better deal than using an emulator,
and certainly a great deal more reliable, at least initially.

The upshot of my comments is that the homesteader market should not be the
focus of any sort of long-term planning, and pricing is always part of that
planning.

Wirt Atmar