Ah, you've seen right through me... We need to get our minds off it for a while, now, I think... However, I'd actually hoped the discussion would quickly leave the real vs. virtual iron and stimulate some interest in the simulators and their range of capabilities. For example, the IBM 1620 emulator, written in Java, is very nice graphically; the 1620 had a great front panel. You can toggle in a program and run it; additionally, it comes with a memory test (or somesuch) already "loaded". But it has no facilities to load/save programs to/from disk. OTOH, Doug Jones' PDP/8E emulator provides those capabillites, and if you haven't seen Bernhard Baehr's PDP8/E emulator for the Mac, you should, assuming you have a Mac on which to run it. Hands down, though, the DEC-10 emulators are most excellent! They are able to provide me with a nearly exact duplicate of one of the computing environments I grew up with and miss. The few differences are: I'm the only user (something we used to live for), and the machine name doesn't say I U P U I in it. But I can change *that*... I can also get other users online, but that's another story... Regards, -dq