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Well, I'm not the person you're responding to, but I have some possible suggestions. I'm not so sure. While I've never tried, I'd lay decent odds that it's a good deal easier to cobble together a working ISA board than a working PCI board. Thus, having an ISA bus makes the machine significantly more hackable in at least one reasonably plausible way. (386s can generally be assumed to be ISA machines, even though there are plenty of more recent machines with ISA.) Also, wasn't 386 instruction execution time predictible to the clock-cycle level (as opposed to more recent machines with caches and execution units involving pipelined x86 emulators running on RISC cores and such, which greatly complicate execution time prediction)? That makes them easier for doing things involving precise timing. And, of course, it's entirely possible that 16-year-old happens to be emotionally attached to 386s for reasons completely unrelated to their technical merits or lack thereof - perhaps there's some cherished game that doesn't run decently on anything newer (I've seen some such), or perhaps that person's first machine was a 386, or, well, there are lots of possibilities. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B