I recently read that Microsoft has recently improved the startup speed of Internet Explorer to be much faster than Netscape. They accomplished this by putting large chunks of what is done in IE startup into the "operating system". I was hoping that we could accomplish the same with XEmacs by dropping as much of it as possible into device drivers. Or, if that is not possible, into the upper half of the kernel. Disk driver code looks like a good place to hide a lot of the lisp engine since that code is already rather complex. Good software design mandates that complexity be seperated out; this is why all complex code in a software system should always live in the same file. A major win would be that we could use all of the familiar Emacs commands would be available at the login prompt and in single-user mode. I have already begun writing a white paper and hope to get a government grant for a study on rebinding "C-x C-c" to "sync; sync; sync; halt" in single user mode. I believe that this effort would win many converts from the FSF Emacs crowd. We can begin with the more popular and freely available operating systems like GNU Hurd and then move on based on that experience. I will begin writing letters on impressive government letterhead to Microsoft explaining our noble effort and demanding source code to Windows 98 and NT. They have no choice but to comply since they are already running scared because of the severe legal action that the US government has arrayed against them. Since Emacs already supports the concept of "the editor is the operating system" I think that it is logical to rally around the idea that "the operating system is the editor". This has prompted me to file for a US Patent entitled "Software" that would give me rights to this idea and many others dealing with programmable devices. (As a side note I discovered that Apple never patented the idea of putting the user interface and windowing system in the kernel and so I am also proposing that X11 also be dropped into the kernel although into the clock tick handling portion of it since X11, after all, also contains event loops and timer procs). I will soon be announcing a mailing list dealing with "XEmacs in kernel" issues. Until then, let's not make any changes to XEmacs that would make it incompatible with interrupts. lonhyn