Hardware (What Interests me....) was : (PDP-8/s on e-bay)

Waht you need is practice :-). And IMHO there's no better way to learn troubleshooting than to be 'thrown in at the deep end' by somebody giving you a PDP11/45 with the printsets, but with no other information (this happeend to me about 14 years ago, it took me several months before I was happy to power her up....). Or even worse to be given a machine with no scheamtics and with no chance of getting said schematics.... You _really_ learn fast when that happens... Well, it depends on the level of documentation, sure... However, I'm the sort of person who learns by doing, not by reading (only). I like to connect my 'scope or logic analyser to verious points in the circuit and actually see what's going on. And I don't have the equipment to directly probe the silicon die. I think the documenation on the PDP11/45 (this being the machine I am most familiar with) is at least an order-of-magnitude more detailed than that on any microprocessor I've seen... Equally, I think it's impossible to design good hardware (processors, video display suystems, etc) without some understanding of the software that is to run on them. But then it still amazes me that I know many programmers who don't own a 'scope or soldering iron (and wouldn't really know how to use them anyway), but I don't know a single hardware hacker who doesn't have a C compiler and know how to use it. -tony