Thanks to all who filled me, a newcomer here, in on the merits and 
appreciation of PG. I obviously formed an opinion from too little 
research! I agree, BTW, that the more you can rely on a cookbook, the 
better and faster the meals get done.

As for my project, I'll poke at it slowly -- it has to fit into a 
zillion other things. Meanwhile I still keep looking for a ready-made 
serial port snoop.

I actually have one, but it runs under DOS. And its menus are all in 
German. Problem is I want to watch some port communications between a 
PC and an external device, and we have only one PC in house, though I 
think I'm gonna get the second PC with a dead 386 m'board upgraded to 
a Celeron. But I'd prefer to do as much on a Mac as possible, and we 
have about Macs floating around here.

Cheers,

Ray