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.