Quoting John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>: Well it was a college of FE and they pretty much only used PC clones which almost exclusivly use ASCII :) Now in my present job we did used to have an IBM system 36, which I believe used EBCDIC, we did have soem PCs with twinax cards running emulation software to access it. That's not such a good analogy, it's perfectly possible to have a mineral with an organic and a non organic part at least using the chemisty definition of organic...... Cheers. Phill. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.