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by ronsor 1529 days ago
Even in DOS, I think

    copy LPT1 output.bin
would have worked at the time.

Anyway, was there a chance you posted that story to Reddit or somewhere else previously? I'm sure I've read it before.

1 comments

Thanks - I don't know if I ever tried that. I'm curious if that works, sadly I don't have any hardware to check anymore.

It seems unlikely to me though that that would work on DOS without special software because it's such a pauper's OS. To implement the read-side, the DOS kernel or COPY program would have to have a way to pretend to be a printer and then clock the data in according to some protocol. And given DOS is so resource constrained, seems unlikely Microsoft would add code in those fundamental pieces for such a use case, unless it were as simple as switching a few instructions.

There is also the INTERLNK and INTERSVR programs that are built-in to either MS-DOS 6 or 6.22 that could help with that use case.

Yeah, I've probably posted about it before - maybe even here.

Copying from a COM port could work because the MODE command could set the various settings - but input from LPT1 or PRN wouldn’t work by default in DOS.