The following will be of interest only to those dozen or so list members
who are struggling to maintain antique QB applications.

A thread some months ago discussed whether MS QuickBasic worked on a
PowerMac, with somewhat divergent results. My own experience, on 3
different models, was that everything worked -- except that compilation
always failed  :(   It is understood throughout that Rick Brown's fabled
CleanLaunch, written in FB, is used to launch any successfully QB-compiled
applications, since all are non-32-bit-clean.

As a happy update to that thread, it turns out that QB is _fully_
functional on an iMac running OS 8.5. Everything works: compile with any
options, Open, Save, Run in interpreter...

This happy result obtains if, and _only_ if, the Speech Manager extension
is turned off. With the Speech Manager on, compilation nearly always fails
and QB appears useless. After I found that QB worked reliably with all
extensions off, a few binary subdivisions of the extensions list revealed
the culprit, as discussed recently on this list.

The following speed comparison is between a 33 MHz 68040 and a 266 MHz G3:-

                   Quadra 650   iMac
compile time       25s          6s
run compiled Apl   102s         38s

Thus iMac was 3-4 times faster than Quadra in these tests. Interestingly,
on iMac I do not have to launch QB itself with CleanLaunch -- just the
compiled apps.

Executive summary: QB lurches on, fragile but still usable.

Robert