Thank you both for the suggestions and help <3 but I think I will still just do what I was originally planning, dropping a zip100 into a newer system with pata ports and network sharing it so I can use it as if it was in my primary pc.

Networking in DOS (at least for the purposes of transferring large amounts of data back and forth) is really trivial to do. NFS, SMB/CIFS is a little trickier.

Just get a network card with a packet driver (Intel, 3Com and Realtek cards are well supported) and use the ftpsrv program included in the mTCP suite. Use whatever ftp client you want at the other end to upload and download.
Most packet drivers are unloadable, so it's easy to setup a simple batch file to load the driver, start the ftp server and then unload the driver again once you exit the ftp server... so it's not as though it uses any memory when not in use.

For reference, I get around 3-4mbytes/sec out of my amd 5x86 133 and a basic RTL8139C 10/100 pci nic. On my p166 laptop I start up cardsoft dos drivers before loading the packet driver for my pcmcia nic (a basic 10baset one), but still get 1.1-1.2mbytes/sec. Even with only a 3C509B in my 286 based system I could get around 800kbytes/sec.

Much faster than lugging cd's, floppies or zip disks back and forth.

I only use intel nics, I already have an intel PRO/100 S in this. I'll play with mTCP later. 😀

interesting, I will try mTCP too on my 5x86 machine tomorrow 😁

jaqie wrote:

No thanks, I'd much rather use something that doesn't have the risk of water retention and future oxidation of small inside areas. I think I would much rather take a toothbrush with mineral spirits to a board than that!

I can can attest to the washing/drying/baking process, but I mean, I pretty much said everything that I do in that Packard Bell thread of the one I restored. If you know what you are doing and don't dick around, there wont be any risk or issues. It is not a process I recommend however for the clumsy or anyone with attention span issues.

clumsy. THAT'S ME! >.>

There is no shame in it. Some people just are by nature. The only time it could really be a issue is if you know you are and you purposefully mess with stuff anyway, and botch everything, and it happens to be other peoples stuff.

P2P networking? Not sure what that means. But regular networking under DOS isn't that bad.

Assuming you have a reasonable Ethernet card with a packet driver you can run all sorts of network programs. For sharing a drive letter with another machine (Windows or Linux) you can use MS LAN Manager. For the classic Internet applications you can use mTCP, which others have pointed out already. Those applications include an FTP client, FTP server, Telnet client, IRC client, etc. And they all work in the HAL-9000 builds of DOSBox too. (I use that extensively for development and testing.)

I have a few "bridge boxes" around too, but that's because I'm working with ancient hardware that often only has 5.25" double density drives. If you have something that has a 1.44MB drive, go the network route. It beats the hell out of shuffling media around.

-Mike