Greetings list-friends.... Though I mainly Lurk here, with your kind indulgence I would like to add another fiber to the 'WRU' thread now extant, because it is so fascinating seeing the "unity-in-diversity" theme alive and well. I am 46 and currently chief engineer at one of the big LA movie studios. It's an awful lot of fun with a little stress thrown in I have two inter-related Main Interests: music and electronics. I began piano at 6, organ at 12, and in HS and college played also various things with bows and strings. When I was 11, my father took me to his work one saturday, and I was allowed *inside* the glass-enclosed shrine where the newly installed GE 635 lived in all it's glory. I was utterly hooked. I had to have one, right then, in my room, mine all mine. It was the *smell* also, the warm electronics, the smell of the tape, and the sound... After college (BSEE) and the Draft, I worked at various music-related tech jobs thru the 70's and early 80's, then did some years as a systems analyst and data comm products manager for a Big Phone Company. Got my fill of computer-programming; I'm a hardware guy. Along the way I filed some patents, wrote a few papers and some short stories, and recorded hours of often-forgettable music. Then the movie business happened, and the rest is geography. Currently I have six PDP-11 systems in various states of being and about twenty or so micros and related items strewn all over the house... my living room now looks like a circa-Seventies college computing center. I also have a Pent-100 machine under W95, an AST 486/33 for fax and voice mail, and a Mac PPC and MAC SE in my home studio... which brings up my other (sort-of related) collection, vintage electronic instruments. I have many older keyboards and synth modules, including a pretty big Moog and a few ARPS, etc. I have a fantasy of running Music IV (or Csound) under Unix on the PDP 15 with period DACs providing signals to the Moog.... a living early 70's music research lab. Maybe the Minc-11.... naw, never mind. I've held a Ham radio ticket for many years, and just now I'm about two weeks away from getting a pilot's license, *if* the examiner and the weather are co-incident and *if* I pass the damn checkride... oops, off topic. sorry. I share Tim Shoppa's concern for preservation of recorded media, and I am very active in the restoration and preservation of the record of our society before it is gone forever. This is the main drive for my collection.... also I have, like Sam, many thousands of books, and among them several dozen computer-related ones, from the late forties on. It's very true: anyone can get hardware, but the docs, well, there's another thing entirely. I have a webpage, which I need badly to revise, but here is a view of some of the collection: www.lightsound.org. Now I really *must* get it brought up-to-date.. ;} Okay: enough bandwidth for one evening. E-mail is welcome and checked often. Cheers John