Setting up a VAXstation

Well, of course. I _did_ specifically mention that I was talking about SBus-era Suns. True. Emulation does have its place. But talking about that wouldn't've addressed ARD's puzzlement. But only in an emulated world. As a simple example, I have an SBus card that does HP-IB (or GP-IB, or perhaps both - it's been long enough I'm not clear on how similar they are any longer). An emulator might be able to emulate the card from the host-software perspective, but it's not going to be able to actually talk to other HP-IB (resp. GP-IB) peripherals over the emulated card - unless it's backed by a real interface, of course. I'm certainly not going to argue that emulation, including hardware emulation, is valueless. But that isn't what Tony was asking about. Perhaps - but only at substantial additional cost (whether money or called-in favours or effort put into digging for sources or whatever). Reliability isn't free. Of course, there is a place for reliable peecees. I'm not going to argue against them; in fact, I wish they were more popular. But they are not relevant to my explaining to Tony why I behaved in ways he found so puzzling. /~\ 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