On August 24, Adrian Vickers wrote: I dunno about that. In the past 24 hours, I've worked on the innards of an SGI Onyx, an AlphaServer 2100A, and a PDP11/34a. I'll take the 25-year-old PDP11 over any of them, physical design wise. Having seen the inside of a recent PeeCee a few weeks ago, there's NOTHING elegant going on there. Now a Cray T90 (a relatively recent Cray vector supercomputer) with its motorized zero-insertion-force connectors...now THAT'S elegant. But it could afford to be. PIC chips kick butt. They're wonderful. I use the CCS C compiler, which is very nice and comes with LOTS of example code in the form of "drivers" for various popular chips (I2C EEPROMs, Dallas Semiconductor serially-interfaced RTC chips, iButtons, etc) that have proven extremely useful. It also directly controls the PicStart programmer as well as a few others. The downside to the CCS C compiler is that it runs under Windoze...not having any (and not wanting any) Windoze crap here, I fired up a copy of VirtualPC on my G4 Mac; it runs nicely under that. There are a LOT of different PIC chips available, from the older 16C54 to the incredibly popular 16F84 (the only one anyone ever hears about, rather stupidly IMO because there are MUCH better ones), to the 16C745 with an on-chip USB interface. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Laurel, MD