This is an old  Space Shuttle that Robin used for awhile running XP until
the motherboard failed. I got one of the new EPIA mother board
with processor for $169. 256Meg of RAM cost me $27. DOS uses only
640K directly. The motherboard bolted right in the Space Shuttle case
and power supply. I had to butcher the back panel however. The old DOS
hard drive booted right up no problem. The same thing cannot be said for
Windows XP. Change the motherboard and you are *&^%$. Since I could
not fix it for Robin's use I bought her a Mac. No viruses on the Mac
and it syncs with her Blackberry.

There are things you can do in DOS that are difficult or impossible
in Windows. The thing I miss the most is engineering programing in
Quick BASIC. That can be done in Windows but the text is too small to
see. I find that more flexible than using spread sheets. Also processing
text files is easily done in QB.

DOS is a real time operating system (almost) with direct access
to the hardware. I wrote a moving map program driven by a GPS in 1990 or
there abouts. I also wrote a bunch of financial and check writing
programs.
That output data in comma delimited form so it can be loaded directly into
a spread sheet for further analysis.

Paul Lamar ...No rotor no motor.

Sometimes the screen text on a windows box can be made larger by pressing
ctrl-+..



Regards,

Matt-

Yes that was an older version of Windows I think. Does not work on
XP version 5.1.2600.

The command prompt window (AKA terminal window) properties font and so forth can be
fooled with but you can crash the computer big time by putting in the wrong values.
It won't reboot on its own. Apparently what it does is change the boot disk for some
strange reason. That bit of info is normally stored in the battery backed up CMOS
or possibly flash memory now-a-days. I guess what it wants from you is to insert a DOS
boot floppy disk :) I had to turn the power off and reset the boot disk to  HDD and it
finally came back up. Had me worried there for awhile as I use that Windows computer
for Rhino. If you do this you better have the Windows boot DVD handy.

I finally got the terminal program to act like a Linux Red Hat terminal
and come up in the raw command line mode full screen :)
QB then works like it used to on DOS. All the old DOS commands work.
Apparently the direct access to the hardware starts to work as I
ran this program with several values and it seemed to work.
PRINT PEEK(xxxx)

If this truly works you can write a short QB program that dumps
the BIOS to a file on hard disk that can then be disassembled and
turned into uncommented, hard to understand assembly language source code.

BTW Don't run POKE(XXXX) UNLESS YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
That, in some cases, might destroy the computer forever because modern
computers store the BIOS in writable flash memory and not old fashion
Read Only Memory. You would have to find a way of restoring the BIOS.
A lot of this is speculation on my part.

I did not try direct hardware access to the printer or serial ports yet.
If that works you can run my free moving map program with FAA airport
data base attached to your GPS on your notebook computer. You can have
the QB source code if you wish.

At that point there is no way to get back to the old terminal set up short of reinstalling
XP as far as I can tell. You can exit the terminal and get back the hi rez Windows
XP mode by typing "exit" of all things :)

This is an HP Pavilion zd8000 notebook computer so your mileage may
vary as this is real low level stuff.

-----------------------------------------------------
Opss I was wrong about it changing the boot disk. Turns out I had
a non boot disk in the add on USB floppy disk drive and the floppy
boot parameter was set ahead of the HDD boot in the BIOS settings.
That is why it would not reboot.

The good news is the terminal DOS treats the USB serial port as a floppy
port. C:\A: works for direct access to the floppy. Type "dir" and you
instantly get a file listing off the floppy disk in the floppy drive.
Evidence that the RS232 direct access will work in raw DOS mode.
USB ports are closely related to RS232 ports as one can get a hardware
adapter to convert a USB port to an RS232 serial interface.

BTW on the Mac there is a terminal that allows you to get under
the Apple gui and a lot of the BSD UNIX commands start to work.
Not only that the UNIX manuals are in there for the UNIX commands.
Type "man ls" for an example. Type "cd .." for a couple of times
and then "cd bin" and then "ls" and you will have a listing
of the UNIX commands that are in the Mac. Too bad there are not
a lot more UNIX or Linux programs available for the Mac.
Note the UNIX/Linux  commands and the DOS commands are near identical
in a lot of case.