If IBM made toasters ...
   They would want one big toaster where people bring bread to be submitted for overnight toasting.  IBM would own the worldwide market for five, maybe six toasters.

If Xerox made toasters ...
   The toaster would have 30 buttons with unintelligible icons.  You could toast one-sided or double-sided.  Successive slices would get lighter and lighter.  The toaster would jam your bread for you.

If Radio Shack made toasters ...
   You would have your choice of Good, Better, and Best toasters. The staff wouldn't know the difference between the three, but they could sell you all the parts to build your own toaster.

If University of Waterloo made toasters ...
   They would immediately spin off a company called WatToast.

If ParcPlace made toasters ...
   Their OO building block system would be called EGGO.

If Oracle made toasters ...
   They'd claim their toaster was compatible with all brands and styles of bread, but when you got it home you'd discover the Bagel Engine was still in development, the Croissant Extension was three years away, and that indeed the whole appliance was just blowing smoke.

If Sun made toasters ...
   The toast would burn often, but you could get a really good cup o' Java.
   It would take ten minutes to make a slice of toast, but you could opperate the toaster in any room of your house, and at any voltage.

Does DEC still make toasters?
   They made good toasters in the '80s, didn't they?

If Hewlett-Packard made toasters ...
   They would market the Reverse Polish Toaster (RPT), which takes in toast and gives you regular bread.  It would run forever without a single service call, but require $100 bread refills every 5000 slices.

If Tandem made toasters ...
   You could make toast 24 hours a day, and if a piece got burned the toaster would automatically toast you a new one.

If Thinking Machines made toasters ...
   You would be able to toast 64,000 pieces of bread at the same time.

If Cray made toasters ...
   They would cost $16 million, but would be faster than any other single-slice toaster in the world.

If the Rand Corporation made toasters ...
   It would be a large, perfectly smooth, seamless black cube. Every morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it, but nobody would know how it got there.  Their service department would have an unlisted phone number, and the blueprints for the box would be classified government documents. The X-Files would have an episode about it.

If the NSA made toasters ...
   Your toaster would have a secret trap door that only the NSA could access, in case they needed to get at your toast for reasons of national security.

If Sony made toasters ...
   The Toastman, which would be barely larger than the single piece of bread it is meant to toast, could be conveniently attached to your belt.
   Toastman II would redefine toast, shrinking it to half it's normal size.  The entire toast industry would follow suit.  In six months, normal toast would disappear.

If Timex made toasters ...
   They would be cheap, small, quartz-crystal wrist toasters that take a licking and keep on toasting.  A special Indiglo light would make it easy to make toast in a darkened movie theater.

If Fisher Price made toasters ...
   "Baby's First Toaster" would have a hand-crank that you turn to toast the bread, which then pops up like a jack-in-the-box.

If the Franklin Mint made toasters ...
   Every month, you would receive a lovely, hand-crafted, authentic Civil War era pewter toaster.

If CostCo made toasters ...
   They'd be really cheap, as long as you bought a six-pack of 'em.

If NeXT made toasters ...
   They would redefine the entire concept of toast, advancing toast development light years beyond any other implementation ... but nobody would care.

If BeBox made toasters ...
   It would create advanced, object-oriented toast that inherits your toast preferences from the previous slice.

If Microsoft made toasters ...
   Toaster 95 would weigh 1000 pounds (requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small city, and consume 60% of the space in your kitchen -- but it would work with bread you bought 15 years ago.  Microsoft would claim Toaster 95 is the first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you want your toast to be. Every time you made toast, the toaster would secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who made them.  Sometimes Toaster 95 would stop working right in the middle of making toast, and the toast would be ruined.  Microsoft technicians would blame the bread.  IBM and Lotus bread would mysteriously fail to toast properly.  Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but would buy them anyway, since most of the bread has been designed around Microsoft's proprietary Toaster Development Interface (TDI).  Microsoft's own bread would always produce better toast, because it used undocumented TDI features.
   Microsoft would advertise a Sun compatible extension to their Toaster 98, but it would only toast one side of the bread.
 

To quote the immortal Pogo:

From: ktryon@lynnwood.com (Ken Tryon)