jr@CC5.BBN.COM (John Robinson) (09/08/86)
The loadst program that is invoked by (display-time) does the sort of thing you want; you might try running it. It spawns a process which runs every minute (you could lengthen this time) and tells you information for your mode line: time, load average, i/o activity, and whether there is mail. Hardly a kludge... /jr