<No confusion; there are simply different metrics for performance and she's <using a different one than you. You are both, in fact, correct. The 486 <will outperform the VAX in integer performance, but the VAX has bundles <more bandwidth to disk than the 486 ever dreamed of. Rodger that but also to memory and IO as well. It's pretty difficult to interface more than a handful of serial lines to a PC. My MicrovaxII comfortably has 32lines (all running at 9600 as that was the fasest modem in 1989!). <> Fact is, these old machines were slow, noisy, hot, power-guzzling behemou <> compared with what we have today. < <No argument there ;-) No facts!. By 1990 vaxen and other vendors (sun, Appllo, IBM...) had pizza boxes and made PCs look like they were running in reverse at no higher power, often higher res video and better IO. VAXen were amoung the first to run busses like FDDI and broadband as well when PCs didn't have interfaces for that yet. Allison