I've forgotten who created stdio, USG or the research group. Can any of the youthful BTL folks of the 1970's refresh my mind. Given that stdio was invented and, in my opinion at the time, a reasonable and usable standard interface to IO on Unix, I am curious why no standard for networking was developed or proposed and discussed. Sockets just defined a new and very quirky IO interface for Unix based systems. Was any thought given to defining networking using the creat/open/read/write/close/mknod/link/unlink/chmod/chown model of IO in UNIX? Ed Bradford -- Advice is judged by results, not by intentions. Cicero