Brings back memories... Back in early 1981 I worked for a shipping line in Cranford NJ in their IT department. The company had just ordered 4 new super-wide cargo ships that just fit the Panama Canal and the Chief Marine Architect came to the IT department to ask for assistance in programming a PDP-8 to write a load distribution check program so that the ship would not keel over, or break in the middle - when being loaded 12 stack high containers. Had to take into account stress and strain - mathematical algorithms. My boss called me in to talk to him and he asked " if I knew how to determine the area under a curve..." - I knew my engineering math - Simpson's rule and also FORTRAN IV and was immediately drafted. What was needed also was a graphical way of entering the data, and displaying the results optionally graphically on the screen (tty ?). My friend Wayne Rawls knew BASIC - he wrote the front end - passed me the input on a large floppy - my FORTRAN IV program ran and did the stress/strain analysis for the ship - and I passed the output back to him on the floppy that he then displayed on-screen. A lot of grinding of the floppy drives for the FORTRAN compiler - no spinning hard disks as the PDP-8 would be installed on-board ship - and in those days of A/C computer rooms would be a non-starter. It all worked well - Wayne took the PDP-8 on a ship to Norfolk to get it checked out and the company used it for many years ! Atindra. -----Original Message-----