>>IIRC, most browsers of old would not start rendering the document until it had been fully transmitted from the server and the connection closed, so a sleep() in a CGI would just make the connection appear to "hang" while unnecessarily eating up resources on the web server. <<<

Thanks, that was what I was thinking of - although I could swear than when I used it in a browser run script in my very early years, it simply ignored the sleep and run as normal - but my memory isn't as good as it used to be! (not good for a 28 year old to be saying ;))