Hi Doug,

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>If you take those points and projects them out it seems we're all heading for a Unix-type solution where the O/S does the heavy lifting but without all the extra garbage collection. Two things:
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>1. I have used an old O/S by the name of Oasis (now THEOS if they still exist at all - The O/S) that ran 10 users on a Z80!!; at the same time!!; all using the same data!!!! THEOS "upped" the ante on the 2/386 platform and if they're still around I cannot help but think they're still doing facinating and wonderful things. It was a very cool O/S in that it had NATIVE support for five (5) different types of data; random, sequential, keyed and a couple of others I don't remember. Auto data file size increases; the whole works - On a 286! IMO what Windws _should_ have been.

>2. Can't MSFT figure out some way to make their O/S more stable and faster? Unix systems, when properly set up, hardly *ever* fail or need some stupid reboot. Jeeze, I've hardly ever worked with Unix but that is a _compelling_ set of (two *G*) features. Reliability and speed. Not to bash MSFT but I sure wish they'd have as a part of their internship programs the requirement to manage a real-life scenarios.

Perhaps, but there's one thing here, that may not get enough attention. How much of a role it plays, I can't say. Perhaps someone a little better versed than I (like Ed Rauh) might know. What I'm talking about is the underlying character based ROM BIOS. These machines were never initially designed to do what they're doing now. If they had been built from day one (like the Mac) to handle the GUI interface, how much different (and probably more reliable) product would we have?

>I can still bring an NT server to its knees by doing some kind of heavy duty processing on it.
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>Hopefully when the 64 bit chips arrive they will be able to handle all the processing thrown at them and
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>You're absolutely correct to point out the fuzzy nature of today's programs though. I must confess to being *quite* attracted to the n-tier world. Makes lots of good common sense to me.
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N-Tier makes a lot of sense, just as dynamic linking did previously. On reflection, it occurred to me that it falls nicely in line with the top-down design paradigm. I think it was just that we never considered separating the UI before. I believe that it will help us in creating more stable apps by foricing us to pay greater attention to the overall design and purpose. Just a thought, though.