That takes me back. In my first job, at IBM, I managed a database running on a System/34 - the S/36's older sister, if you like. My favourite bit was the diskette drive. You loaded eight-inch floppies into boxes of ten, and stuck up to two boxes (and three loose floppies) in the drive. The whole lot moved along until the floppy it wanted was in front of the slot; it then sucked the floppy in and read or wrote it at great speed. When our S/34 had a fault on one hard drive I had to back up the remaining drives onto floppies. I discovered about half way through this process that the help line I'd been phoning was support for the database software, not for the machine. I wish they'd told me sooner! The S/34, the big S/36 (5360) and a word processing system of which I can't remember the number all had this drive, but I never saw it anywhere else. When I was at IBM (1985-6) the 5362 compact S/36 (the size of a desk pedestal) and the 5364 desktop S/36 (same box as the PC/AT) had just been released. The 5362 took 8" floppies one at a time, and the 5364 took 5.25" floppies one at a time. How a developer with a 5364 distributed programs to users with the large machines I never discovered... Because I was familiar with the S/34, and was a student on low wages, I got the job of writing some DOS batch files to get a PC to talk to the S/36 at a customer site. The customer was Imperial Tobacco - an office where you couldn't see across the room for smoke - and I was offered more cigarettes on the day I installed the program than in my entire previous life. (I didn't accept, and even so I was barely breathing when I escaped :-) ) I'd love a System/36, even though I've nowhere to put it. But Switzerland, FL is much too far away, so there's no hope... (Sobering thought. At IBM I worked in the large accounts side of marketing - customers who'd pay many millions for a 3084 or 3090 less powerful than a modern PC) Philip.