17 Feb
2015
17 Feb
'15
7:26 a.m.
On 2/17/2015 7:16 AM, JP Hindin wrote:
On Tue, 17 Feb 2015, Mike Loewen wrote:
I used windows 95 as a platform to have multiple dos sessions going with
shared memory. It was not for a BBS, but the same concept would have
worked.
The original setup for one of the debugging setups we had involved
having two systems set up in close proximity with a crossover cable
between the COM1 ports. One would run a debugging program on one port,
and run our package on the other. It was pretty nice, but was not
convenient to duplicate at the time, and also didn't translate to being
able to duplicated as early laptop hardware showed up.
The guys were lugging 2 laptops, and a PCI dock with our hardware around
to customer sites to debug things.
Both systems were massive Microsoft C6 c programs running under dos.
Anyway, I realized I could run both the software in debug mode, and the
debug client in separate windows, but still had no way other than the
serial ports to connect them.
I modified the programs and added a small driver setup to each as an
option to emulate a serial port, which used shared memory to communicate
between the processes. we had an expansion memory that was not used as
system memory, and could be easily located, so I put a few bytes in the
structure to create the port.
Windows 95 booted in real mode, then went protected and returned with
real mode processor sessions, with the base mode still being the
original Dos boot.
Windows 98 went directly into protected or big real protected mode and
created dos sessions, so the base system was not a real mode dos
session. It worked in a lot of cases, but not all. Windows 95 always
had the original dos real mode session as the boot on the processor, so
most everything executed by a dos session as a driver executed in that
real mode.
If you had the ports hooked up, you could set up a session to have
individual dos sessions running in real mode for each port.
If you used the protected bios, you had to deal with different drivers
than the actual Dos drivers that were used prior to the windows
multitasking being around.
I didn't get into trying any of this under Windows for Workgroups type
NT systems, only when 95 came along did i attempt the tricks above.
HOpefully described the structure okay, as it has been a long time since
having to deal with this.
thanks
Jim
On Tue, 17 Feb 2015, JP Hindin wrote:
<chuckles>
True, thanks Mike. I was being specific about DOS, actually - although I
didn't say so, my bad. Certainly there were... shall we say, somewhat more
advanced OS' that just simply "worked". I was more curious about what
wedges people put in place to make multi-nodes in DOS... where it really
didn't.
Thanks though!
- JP
How did people set up multi-node BBS' back in
the day?
I know you could run something like Desqview and run multiple copies on a
single system, and some BBS' (like TBBS) had built-in multitasking so it
handled multiple modems. And, of course, you could get fancy and run a
Novell network. Were there other ways of doing this?
Yes, on a real
multi-tasking OS. A friend of mine and I ran a
home-grown BBS on a Tandy 6000HD running Xenix for a couple of years
starting in 1986 in Sumner, WA. Four 1200bps modems plus the console
allowed 5 of us to be on at the same time. It was primarily a message
system (room-based), with a real-time chat facility.