Back at an M$ developer conference - when DEC was still its own company and pretending to be strong - I remember quizzing the Redmondonians as to why there was no stated plan for X11 support, no plan for a "standardized" RPC, and no plan even for something as "simple" as TELNET. The blank stares were telling. And this was during the days when DEC was working with M$ to get NT running well on Alpha. To their credit, a couple of the DECcies shrugged...

Now just about everyone with a "new" computer has a piece of hardware that is capable of being about as good a server as any VAX ever was. Compile farms are running happily over at sourceforge, and Sun is diddling with its own pay-for-computes farm. "WoW!" has captivated the kiddies -- irrespective of their age. Sure looks like we've cycled back to the age of the server, eh? If CUPS could only be as robust as a VMS print queue...