>It seems to me that a network should have one set of commands for using its >services regardless of which operating system is used to access that >network. Of course, thi problem is also true of The Internet to a degree. "The ONE true and good set? But what then of progress? Or have we reached nirvana now already?" I don't think anyone would argue about the truth of these two statements : (1) There are a strictly finite number of operations which a particular type of application will support (2) These operations are common to all of these applications, although the particular names, commands, syntaxes and descriptions will vary It is only a matter of time until someone gets around to identifying every one of these possibilities and explicitly supporting them - much as modern modems utilize their own command set, to provide extensions specific to the manufacturer, but also recognize the Hayes AT command set as a fairly good general-purpose description of all the things you might want to do with a modem, or printers support their own page description language yet also offer Postscript support, as a pretty good general-purpose PDL that does pretty much what everyone wants a PDL to do. At that point in time - I'd guess within five years - this whole issue will be moot ... you'll tell it what you want and it'll figure it out. How many ways can you ask for a file, anyway ? -- richard