You are hard to argue against :) I think I should have said "multi platform AND use a widely available high performance language". I don't know if Objective-C

You are hard to argue against :) I think I should have said "multi platform AND use a widely available high performance language". I don't know if Objective-C can be considered widely available in the 90's. Apple/NeXT implementation AFAIK wasn't contributed to gcc from the beginning and I don't konw if "Interface Builder" was ever run in anything but NeXTSTEP/MacOS. I really don't know about SmallTalk availability or performance. > Portable as along as the the OS is UNIX/POSIX, got it. :) Well... it excludes VB and Delphi from your list... it would be very good if 90's Microsoft had standardized their OS interface, Sun tried to do that with PWI but was unsuccesful. Also they were x86 only (don't know if VB ran on non x86 NT or CE) while application builder was really architeture independent. But yes, it looks like you really have a point with Visual Age for C++.