Real programmers use DCL and FORTRAN. I used to work for a large engineering firm which used VAXes and VT220's for everything. Mostly we used 11/750's and 11/780's for CAD/CAM. We tried PRO 350's and 380's for engineering applications. I originally programmed structural design of pipe hangers on a PRO 350. For word processing they purchased AT&T 6300's with 10MB HardCards to replace all of the typewriters. All of a sudden everybody could create a document and send it out. File copies were never created or lost. Some people used WordPerfect, MultiMate, WordStar, and IBM DisplayWrite 3. Fonts, margins, and layout all went crazy. How would you like to pay 4 million dollars for a set of Coal fired power plant manuals and end up with a mess? We standardized on IBM DisplayWrite 3 and I was given the task of capturing all of the printing and filing it. We used a MicroVAX II to drive Xerox 2700 laser printers on each floor. Every time you printed we captured and archived a copy. I then created a FORTRAN77 program on the VAX to translate EBCDIC IBM DisplayWrite3 documents to ASCII and then print them. We also included the ability to take HPGL plot files and scale them to fit into an area in a document. We also added special symbols, foreign characters and logos. Engineering companies only believe in FORTRAN. We had a bad experience with a programmer who wrote lots of code in "C" and then left. Most of my support time was spend proving that my software was not at fault when the PC's were not working, the network was hosed or the printer was out of paper. Computer viruses were not a problem, only game players, and wierd spell checkers. I still have my copies of the FORTRAN version of a word processor print spooling application. Mike mmcfadden(a)cmh.edu