I didn't mention them because many don't know about alternate OSs. I've run two machines on BeOS. imagine attempting to run SetiAtHome, Play MP3s, downloading and installing software while surfing the web on a 400 Mhz Pentium II without having any music hiccups. I had Windows 98 on the machine too and I could never have done that with Windows. (Besides SetiAtHome only runs while the screen saver is running on Windows back then. On BeOS it ran the processor at 100% while doing all that other stuff.) Before Jobs came back to Apple, BeOS was being considered for OS-X. It was faster, better at multi-tasking than anything of its day and might just still be better 12 years later. Did I mention that BeOS was designed for a multi-processor box originally? Would have been interesting to have seen where it would have gone if either Jobs didn't go back to Apple or Microsoft hadn't been so successful at preventing it from being installed along with Windows by the manufacturer. That sits right up there with promised vaporware. BeOS was the first OS to allow two running programs to be shoved together and operate as one on the fly. They did that in 1996. The second OS to do that was OS-X about 7 years later. Don't think you can do it yet on Windows. (I really don't know how practical this ability is. It's interesting that it can be done. That was literally taking a running video and slap it onto a geometric shape that's rotating. Without any hangs or hiccups the video continues to play on the surface of the shape. Pretty cool demonstration of great multi-tasking.) Now onto Behringer. Even if their as yet unavailable product is perfect when delivered, their reputation is enough to prevent me from considering it. They've got a lot of product quality improvements that need to be tested by the public before I'm changing my thoughts. (Note: Subaru used to be considered crap cars. They made the changes and are now considered a pretty good product. That's some pretty big changes over a few decades. Behringer might take just as long to change some minds.) That said, I've seen some junk musical gear used quite well by the musician. (Radio Shack keyboards come immediately to my mind.) So the term "pro-gear" kind of irks me. I remember keyboard players being expected to have $20K + of gear. Personally never bought into that and have always said that if I owned a B3, it would never leave my house. I must be tired. I ramble a lot when I'm tired.
