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 

Reply via email to