Neither do the computers I'm working with have Ethernet or USB.

16-bit NICs are $10 apiece, and likely free for the asking from almost any
office's dead PC junk heap.

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.


Besides, there's always the fun of doing it, and that much time
difference should even "pay" for the programming effort.

Seems to me your time would be better spent on things with lasting value.
Linux is free....

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.

No, converting to Linux is NOT free, especially at my age!

--
--Myron A. Calhoun.
Five boxes preserve our freedoms: soap, ballot, witness, jury, and cartridge
NRA Life Member and Rifle, Pistol, & Home Firearm Safety Certified Instructor
Certified Instructor for the Kansas Concealed-Carry Handgun license

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

wrote in message ...
Neither do the computers I'm working with have Ethernet or USB.

16-bit NICs are $10 apiece, and likely free for the asking from almost any
office's dead PC junk heap.

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.

Wollongong. Beame and Whiteside. To name two.

But that's going backwards. With one foot in the grave already, you need to
keep moving forward, not back. If it runs DOS, it'll run Linux.



Besides, there's always the fun of doing it, and that much time
difference should even "pay" for the programming effort.

Seems to me your time would be better spent on things with lasting value.
Linux is free....

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.

It boots off the CD. I know I mentioned that. It's worth mentioning a second
time. And a third: It boots off the CD. No installing, no configuring...
Just boot it, FTP your files, and get on with whatever it is you're trying
to do.


No, converting to Linux is NOT free, especially at my age!

Yeah, I know just what you mean. About the age thing, that is. Time's
wasting; best get to it.