At 08:08 AM 2/4/2016, Liam Proven wrote:
But NT is a better OS in every important or material
way.
It is unusable in one important way. This thread began as a discussion of running serial
port terminal emulators on a PC. At work I still use some MS-DOS programs (admittedly not
terminal emulators) over serial ports. For my purposes (setting up a variety of vintage
specialized hardware over RS-232) NT-based operating systems are sometimes unusable
because they present the application program with a virtual serial port, and MS-DOS
programs running under those operating systems cannot read from or write to the UART
registers. Some of the setup programs for that vintage hardware were written before the
mid-1990s and access the UART registers, so I have to run those under Win98 or earlier. I
have a portable MS-DOS 3.3 machine that I use to set up that vintage hardware.
Dale H. Cook, Roanoke/Lynchburg, VA
Osborne 1 / Kaypro 4-84 / Kaypro 1 / Amstrad PPC-640
http://plymouthcolony.net/starcity/radios/index.html