note seattlejohn Unless I'm growing senile, the 8088 (at 4.77 MHz) was the microprocessor in the original IBM PC, which was hardly an obscure machine, as well as its successor, the PC/XT. (There was a 286-based XT later, I think.) Isn't the 8088 just an 8086 with 8-bit instead of 16-bit bus to save some money in the supporting components? <p>Anyway, I answered 8088 because that was in the first computer I actually bought with my own money (not a trivial expense at 12 years of age, either, but it certainly ended up being a good long-term investment). Still, for some reason I've got a real soft spot for the Z80-based CP/M systems we used in school for a while. They were actually connected via a primitive network to a centralized 10MB hard disk. Learning assembly language and tinkering with the boot loaders on those things was fun, I must admit. <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#666666">$perlmonks{seattlejohn} = '<a href="http://www.clyman.com">John Clyman</a>';</font> 271255 271510