At any rate, I’m currently on vacation and have limited time and facilities for testing this. Will try to look into it when I come back in late January 2012.

Thank you very much.

I purchased a unit, the first commercial computer for my applications software company and it worked fine, flawless, during many years, before being superseeded by the IBM-PC.

The availability of flexible disks of different sizes (5 1/4 and 8 inches), and also a “huge” Harddisk (not the size – 5 Megabytes, but the weight!) made your QI-900 an outstanding work-horse. The avalilability of a special program, which supported reading and writing more than one hundred distincts protocols, made the machine specially useful for a software house.

And of course, the concept of windows, drop-down menus, etc made it a very interesting machine, besides full CP/M compatibility.

At that time, we did the processing for many large brazillian financial companies. Usually the systems run in some mini-computers (type Data General, Type Nixdorf, etc mini computers) but we used the QI-900 to develop and test new programs.

One, specially, has surprised us: usually, in order to calculate the IRR – internal rate of return – for each financing contract, it took two hours each day, for a typical daily batch. Which did not permit us to acumulate any batches during the week, otherwise we could not catch up afterwards. The first day we tested it on the QI-900, it took less than 2 minutes. We imagined that nothing had been processed… And to our astonhisment, every IRR was computed! From that day on, we started moving from mini-computers to QI-800 and QI-900 microcomputers, cheaper and faster.

The minicomputers were not bad if you used other languages – Assembly or Basic, but for Cobol language translation, it took almost one hour to compile a single program. In the QI-900 it was almost instantaneus!

The QI-900 keyboard was something really made to last a thousand years! Very nice to the touch, very well organized, never failed.

I kept the QI-900 for many years, donating it afterwards to Prodemge (the State Computing Center in Minas Gerais) Museum, where it dissapeared when they closed the Museum. It was still running like it were the first day of purchase!

Now I will go to your blog and get some more interesting stories. Best Regards from Rodolfo Koeppel

I guess I’ll need to survey to see what else I have that’s still PPC-only.

I want to know if apple will allow apps that have references to small APIs or header files that in turn reference cocoa, that a developer might have built for his own person use to do the same kind of tasks across many apps without coding all over again?

Sure, that sort of thing is very common; it’s done as either a private framework or a static library that you link into your executable. As long as those don’t use private APIs themselves, you’re in the clear.

for example, an EngineeringMath.h file that lets me perform advance mathematical operations without coding for them all over again.

There could be a day when only apps bought through the app store are allowed onto your system.

Well, I think that this will happen soon for certain types of users, as I said; I think it’s unlikely that Apple will force this on all users, including so-called power users, unless they plan stop selling desktop Macs entirely.

There could be a day when only apps bought through the app store are allowed onto your system.