A couple of weeks ago, I posted a message asking for help with a new project that I had undertaken for the West Sussex Record Office. This was to build a computer that was capable of running some very old genealogy programs. Over the past 20 or so years, WSRO have received genealogy data deposited by individual researchers, many of whom have passed away in the intervening years. Of course, this data should have been deposited in GEDCOM format so that it can easily be transferred to a modern program, but much of it is in an old program's native format and now cannot be retrieved without the parent program. Some people have found it strange that GEDCOM was not more widely used, but 20 years ago, not every programmer had signed up to the idea of making their software compatible with other programs that were in the market. Also, many family historians didn't use purpose-built software because it wasn't very easy to obtain and also because it wasn't very powerful. So, many family tres were built on spreadsheets or within word processors. The response to my appeal, made on just the SFHG and Sussex-Plus Mailing Lists, was most generous. I have been offered items from List Members in the UK, Sweeden, Canada and Australia and jiffy bags have been arriving in my post at intervals within the past 10 days. One day, I had 5 such envelopes contaning a variety of CD's, floppy disks and also a 56k modem. On behalf of WSRO, I would like to thank everyone who responded, it really has been a magnificent effort by all concerned. The last of these items arrived this morning. Now that the "first wave" of programs have been received and loaded, I have today been able to accept further offers of genealogy packages that have been made in the past 10 days. I wanted to see what arrived from the original offers before accepting any new items because two people sent me different CD's which were a compilation of programs and I wanted to see precisely what they were and if they still worked, before accepting new offers. The computer is now in proper working order and has been built entirely from components that have been donated, so is a good example of how unwanted electrical goods can be recycled to a new purpose. The operating system is Windows 98SE which is the last version of windows where switching between that and MS DOS is relatively simple. In addition to a variety of genealogy programs, some word processors and spreadsheets, such as MS Works and Lotus SmartSuite (amongst others) have been loaded. Hopefully, the final few donations will arrive in the next couple of weeks and then I will be able to deliver the machine to WSRO with the compliments of us all. Best wishes Marion Woolgar Bognor Regis, West Sussex SFHG NO: 3323