MM> Ah me ... took a whole term to derive the principal
 MM> components of a 10 item table of correlations,
 MM> doing everything by hand and mechanical adding
 MM> machine as a fulltime student  ...   and now, on
 MM> this old Pentium, I routinely do a much fuller
 MM> multivariate analysis of 3 or 400 variables in
 MM> seconds.... :-)

i have experianced almost the same type of thing... i wrote a program years
ago to find what i call Pythagorean Triples... they are the A, B, and C in
A^2+B^2=C^2... 3 4 5 being the first set... back then, it took many hours
for those up to 100 to be found... on today's machines, that run is over in
seconds... i've adjusted the program over the years and run it every once
in a while just for fun and it still takes only seconds for it to find the
triples up to the highest it can count in that language...

)\/(ark