wrote in message ...
And I have several. Have you ever made a NIC work with DOS?
If so, I'd sure love to learn how you did it.

NICs work fine in DOS. At least back with Windows NT (and probably still
2000... possibly not XP anymore though) you could tell it to build you a "DOS
startup disk" which configured most everything you needed to connect to a
NetBEUI-based server (which is still supported in XP, etc.). Many network
cards still come with DOS drivers, and of those that don't, many really cheap
ones are still "NE2000 compatible" and generic drivers can be found. I'm sure
you can Google for the details -- I haven't done this in a number of years,
but very commonly what I used to do was make DOS network startup disks so that
I could connect to a server to pull over a complete hard drive image to set up
the machine using, e.g., Norton Ghost.

Linux may be free, but the aftermath of installing Linux would cost
YEARS of effort to "port" the:
801 FORTRAN programs I currently use
225 Pascal programs I currently use
452 DOS .BAT and Norton's DOS .BTM scripts I currently use.

There's a very good chance the vast majority of your programs would work under
WINE in Linux. That being said, Linux -- especially with the "popular"
desktops such as KDE -- has gotten to the point of requiring powerful enough
hardware that, if your PCs wouldn't "comfortably" run at least Windows 2000,
you probably shouldn't bother with Linux as you probably won't have a pleasant
experience if you just perform a "default" install of any contemporary
distributions.

---Joel