Mark Bixby wrote

> I like to describe Unix as a collection of tiny building blocks  ...
You are only
> limited by your imagination, or your lack of knowledge of available Unix
tools.

> For me, MPE's great strength is ease of use.  Lots of great macro-scale
tools,
> reliability, etc.  But if your task falls outside of the available MPE
toolset,
> you might have to do a lot of coding from scratch.

It seems to me that much of the touted "strenght" of UNIX comes not from
the OS per say but from a rich (and idiosycratic) collection of de-facto
standard tools.

The interesting question is why such a collection never grew up in the HP
3000 community as freeware as it did in the UNIX world.