This discussion is improving as it proceeds, I think! One more factor to consider is the desirability of offloading peripheral tasks to peripheral processors so that the central processor(s) do not have to service absolutely everything that happens inside the cabinet. Input-Output tasks are ideal candidates for offloading from the CPU. That is done in IDE devices, in video cards, in real modems (as opposed to Win modems), in keystroke processing inside the keyboard, etcetera. Software speech synthesis is a fairly heavy duty processing load, and if it can be handed off to an 80186 or whatever, that is very good news for the CPU. Chuck My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh The Moon is Waning Crescent (30% of Full)
