Just a personal commentary on that article from the local newspaper. I live in Freehold, a few miles from the Holmdel facility, and I used to work in Holmdel some time back. I worked on several 68K based boards used in a product called DACS. I worked on both hardware and firmware, maintained UNIX for several groups, struggled with nmake and software manufacturing for several products (bugging both Glenn Fowler and David Korn when new nmake releases broke builds), supported the pcc compiler as a cross compiler, etc., for DACS and other products. I was also responsible for the architecture of something called the Line Monitoring Equipment (LME), used in some undersea cable systems, well before Submarine Systems was sold off to Tyco. I can't tell you how many hours I spent in that building. It was fun. Another loss to the UNIX community that I can personally report was the closing, one year ago this month, of the old DEC Manalpan facility (UNX). This was the home of VAX System V, a large portion of Ultrix, and everything that made up OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX except for kernel, drivers, and several other components (although I personally did some kernel work on occasion). We did shell and utilities, about 1/2 of X, Motif, CDE, installation, mail, and other parts of the OS that made it useful. If you look at old uucp headers anywhere on usenet, any of the traffic with headers that included systems with "unx" in the name was routed through this facility. I was there from when it was Digital through Compaq and finally HP, almost all the way through to the closing. In general, the whole area is undergoing a massive transition. If I had to guess, I'd say it is mostly due to the downswing in telecom, followed closely by the closing of Fort Monmouth. The latter, I think, is the death blow for technology in this region. For hardware developers, not much left at all around the area, and software people have to either go financial in NYC, or work for a pharmaceutical or insurance company. Not much room left for innovation here. Sad. Pat --------------------------------------------- This message was sent using Monmouth Internet MI-Webmail. http://www.monmouth.com/