Skipware level, late 2012

On Mon, 15 Oct 2012, Ethan Dicks wrote: earliest PC implementations: There was a commercially available (home business?) interface to communicate between two 5150s through the cassette port! Even a Y connector to be able to connect more than two! That product, of course, died a year later when the 5160 came out (with no cassette port) There was even a classroom version! (based on an earlier TRS-80 product?) By 1983, Orchid (and others) were marketing PC networks. AFTER we had performance and reliability issues, we found out that we were the first ones to go 16 or more computers on the "network". TSRs were used by users to implement extremely crude multi-tasking in MS-DOS. What else was INT-28h for? Borland's Sidekick, and the later Central Point PC-Tools. I used PC-Tools for my business telephone log, etc. But, the package intercepted the critical error handler, and IGNORED critical errors, such as disk I/O errors! Rather than an "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" notification of a problem, it would simply report success and LOSE the sector being written! Oh, well. Windoze came out soon after (crude pre-emptive multi-tasking) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com