Thanks for the reply Patrick,

here are the answer of your questions

- your serial input arrives at random times YES
- you want to calculate running times (probably minutes or hours)YES
and a few seconds one way or the other doesn't matter
- you have some sort of serial "network" ?? NO
- not every machine reports in every time ?? YES 1 MACHINE IS RESERVED

And my questions

the strings was like under...

"Start 1 M2A|M4D|M6A...."

in that case how can i insert the data to dbf like your sample
machine to machine

05/09/2002 14:53 PM M2A
05/09/2002 14:53 PM M4D
05/09/2002 14:53 PM M6A