9 Jul
2014
9 Jul
'14
2:27 a.m.
On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 12:37:42AM -0600, ben wrote:
[...]
Other than UNIX did any DOS really support hardware on
the smaller machines?
True Serial I/O was never handled under DOS. One can forgive the lack of DOS
on say a PDP 8, not on a cpu like 8088. Ben.
MS-DOS had drivers for serial and parallel ports, and you could redirect
streams. That's how Laplink could bootstrap over a serial port after typing a
handful of commands into DOS.
They were pretty dire drivers though, and any application worth its salt would
ignore DOS and bit-bang the ports directly.