Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! >> How to live without serial (RS232) or parallel (PRN) ports? >> Can we cope??? > That's a real problem you bring up--the evolution of hardware away > from the old "standard equipment" that DOS was designed for. There is > still lots of used equipment available, but it's getting harder to find > as we all know. This leads to a rather interesting question - what is to be considered "standard equipment", and who (or what) is reponsible for maintaining compatibility with this standard? For example, if a serial port is to be considered part of the standard hardware, can a program then rely on a fully functional serial port to be present? And if there is none, is it necessary to provide some kind of emulation to fake its presence? Not that I really know how to emulate an RS232 serial connection over USB, that is. However, I think anything that uses a well-defined software API, like the BIOS, should also work on modern hardware, shouldn't it? Udo -- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de -- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/ Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --