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