Thats it - I still go mad when people are ranting about the x86 architecture (kind of popular) but they never tried to understand the features, or they never seen the whole family. In fact, Intel designed the 86 as part of an chipset in a very mainframe like way - A general purpose CPU: 8086, a specialized floating point add on: 8087 and a versitale IOC: 8089. A structure as found on most mainframe at this time (Remember, also IBM offered their customers to get specialized add ons to improve floating point performance on the /370). Since IBM used only the CPU and FPU, the actual PC design is exact like a Mainframe without an IOC: Just painfull slow. Gruss H. P.S.: The hate-segmentation-rantig against the x86 also drives me mad - the segmentation sceme used is a very good compromise between usability and performance. Loosing up to 15 Bytes per segment isn't realy a drawback compared to granularities of 4 or 8K today ... -- Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut HRK