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by xanathar 741 days ago
Everything from DOS 5.x onwards (including Windows 9x and NT) came with QBasic, previous versions of DOS had GW-BASIC.

Not the greatest tools out of the box, but still better than nothing.

1 comments

MS/PC-DOS shipped with debug.com since pretty much the first versions. It is a perfectly usable assembler where you can type a short loop that receives characters from the serial port and outputs them to a file. Similar things have been done many times to salvage hosed systems where a little more than copy file COM1: was required.

With the Internet today, you probably don't even need to remember the instruction names, you can probably find a printout of a program that does this.