Just for the sake of asking: What is a "real computer?" What are its power requirements? What are Its space requirements? What is its storage capacity? How? How many calculations per second? What I/O processes? What I/O media? Y'see... I once met a "real computer" -- I think, and used the darned thing for over two years. It was in a big concrete building, way up north (almost to Santa Claus). It occupied the entire basement of a large, windowless, cubical concrete building, and generated enough heat to warm the whole place during some pretty harsh winters. Its power requirements on a day-to-day basis kinda rivalled Spokane... Its base mainframe measured 60' x 120', had 30 dumb-terminal workstations in its ops center, serviced 120 remote terminals in the building, networked 35 outlying remote stations, but could boast only 1MB of memory, and could handle maybe 3000 calculations per second while in pre-emptive time-sharing. It was idiosyncratic: Though end users tended to interact with it via attached light pens and keyboards, it also had some of the very first "touch" screens -- it only gave up the time-slice when it wanted to... You talked to it through both mag tapes and punch cards. If you fed it a nice, neat stack of punch cards, it literally vomited "hash" back at you. If you attempted the same program with 18" 'high-speed' reel-to-reel mag tapes, it fed you back spaghetti. There was often electrical arcing between user screens and light pens, and I hate to think of the number of monitor screens replaced on the 'touch screens' when some user thought calibration, or 'a little harder' meant putting a knuckle or two through the screen... And we won't even go into the horrid monsters at the end of each corridor know as "batch printers..." It that a "real computer?" [demime 1.01a removed an attachment of type application/ms-tnef]