DOS ain't dead

Hello,

I work a lot older PCs that run various DOSes like MS-DOS and DR-DOS. For copying files between them I used to equip my PCs with network cards and exchanged files using Netware Lite. But the not having enough cards meant that installing and removing the network cards was not worth the effort compared to the gain.

Then I switched INTERLNK/INTERSVR if the DOSes were right, to UFO, an equivalent of LapLink, or I used CF cards if the system is equipped with XT-IDE.

UFO and LapLink are meant to be used on the original LPT ports that can only use four bits to exchange data. I turned some of these old cards in IBM PS/2 compatible bi-directional cards and I'm writing a program for it, partly Pascal, partly ML. But if possible, I want to have the same functionality as when using INTERLNK/INTERSVR.

My question: did someone pioneer in this area and are other programs available that can run under various DOSDes and preferably as open source?

Thank you very much in advance!

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With Kind regards, Ruud Baltissen

http://www.baltissen.org

Try Daves Data LINK (DDLINK), a small & simple PC file transfer program supporting COM, LPT and Ethernet connections (with packet driver), by Dave Dunfield:

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/dos/index.htm

> Try Daves Data LINK (DDLINK), ...

That is another equivalent of LapLink or UFO. And it is not, AFAIK, open source.

Thank you anyway for your efforts.

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With Kind regards, Ruud Baltissen

http://www.baltissen.org

This is the old version. There's a new version that includes improvements and a new DEBUG bootstrap program.

https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/dnld.htm

Discussion about the changes here

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=91539&e=1&view=unread#unread

> Try Daves Data LINK (DDLINK), a small & simple PC file transfer program
> supporting COM, LPT and Ethernet connections (with packet driver), by Dave
> Dunfield:
>
> http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/dos/index.htm

Years ago, I would have recommended File Maven:

https://www.briggsoft.com/fmdos.htm

https://www.briggsoft.com/fmdosfaq.htm

A free file manager with transfer functionality. You can only use the feature in the file manager, so there is no network drive.

You can also use a DOS port of SMBCLIENT to manually interact with Samba / Windows network drives without giving them a DOS drive letter.

Mateusz wrote EtherDFS 5 years ago, a network drive with a DOS client and a Linux host. The DOS side only takes 7 kB of RAM:

https://etherdfs.sourceforge.net/

A more simplistic, sector-oriented ethernet floppy is his ethflop, which takes only 2 kB of RAM. People may remember how large the MSCLIENT network drive drivers were.

https://ethflop.sourceforge.net/

This could be ported to use a serial port / COM port for I/O and a DOS version of the server side could be added, I guess

We also have VMSmount by Eduardo, which lets you use drives of a VMWARE host when DOS is running inside a VM. It also has some awareness of the relationship between Unicode and 20 popular DOS codepages:

https://github.com/eduardoc%61sino/vmsmount

The surname of Eduardo is an evil word according to BTTR, I had to munge the link: It will initially open as 404, but when you then copy and paste the URL shown in your address bar again to load the demunged version, it will magically work. Or just manually type an a instead of the %61. Oh well

I would appreciate if ETHFLOP could be added to the FreeDOS distro, ETHERDFS and VMSMOUNT are already there

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

Thank you all!

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With Kind regards, Ruud Baltissen

http://www.baltissen.org

ppcopy - utility for sending files from Linux to DOS via parallel laplink cable
https://github.com/dmeybohm/ppcopy

You might be able to connect your *nix machine (*BSD, Linux, etc) to DOS via SLIP or PLIP using serial/paralel null-modem/laplink cables.

I haven't found any info on the web on anyone using PLIP in recent years, but SLIP seems to work fine:
https://mcmackins.org/stories/dos-slip.html
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/serial-port-linux-and-dos.28578/

This is the DOS part of SLIP story:
https://github.com/retrohun/mTCP/blob/master/USERDOCS/slip.txt

If your main machine is Windows, if it's 10 or 11, you might be able to use WSL instead of Linux with the help of com0com null modem emulator.

One more option is kermit:
https://kermitproject.org/

It's cross-platform and there are versions for DOS, Windows, UNIX/Linux, etc.

Theoretically, it's also possible to use a DOS PC as a serial console for *nix machine. I think you can transfer the files via sz/rz.

Also, you can find a list of some other (and some mentioned) options here: https://www.retrotechchris.com/2022/12/27/some-goo...-transfer-and-connectivity-from-modern-systems/

A fork of Linux component (EtherSRV) of EtherDFS with some changes: https://github.com/oerg866/ethersrv-linux-866. The changes seem to be mostly related to the way the server works with file names (the case, LFNs, etc).

Another option is to use FTP or TFTP servers and clients