On Saturday 27 April 2002 16:28, you wrote: Actually, its sort of unexpected that you havent been pointed to this project or found this on your own. Its certainly a less cost option than a P370/390 card These guys for example have a turnkey cdrom image where you can go from the cd burner to a TSO login in only a few minutes. A real box can total flood a bundle of gigabit fiber the diameter of your right leg, its the I/O that sets these monsters apart really, their CPUs are no slouch, but not any faster than a common modern PC chip. Course there is their memory scrubing, the ability to hotspare memory modules on the fly, redundancy that can even deal with failed cache and buss lines. After reading about all the bother they go to to make these things survive failures and glitches, it brings to mind a senario where you wonder how many .45 cal pistol slugs the machine could absorb before the failure handler could no longer cope. There is a paper that explains the systems and schemes that go into the machines hardware fault tolerance that would leave the first time readers jaw agape, but i cant dig up the url at present. The emulator is still a very worthwhile project to look at however, and despite me using it first as a brickbat its rather cool and usefull for doing real work. (Development at home etc) Raymond -------------------------------------------------------