Live data from Hacker News

EtherDFS – The Ethernet DOS File System

etherdfs.sourceforge.net

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: EtherDFS – The Ethernet DOS File System

#6

Not a problem most of us have in 2017. I wonder what the use case is for having a bunch of DOS machines.

until 4-5 years back, my wife's lab still owned some old scientific equipment whose control software ran on DOS. they'd dumped another piece of equipment a few years before that which ran an embedded DOS system, and booted/ran off of a 1.44MB floppy. (not a good design decision for long lasting hardware.)

both pieces of hardware were sold to folks who intended to use them.

Re: EtherDFS – The Ethernet DOS File System

#9

Not a problem most of us have in 2017. I wonder what the use case is for having a bunch of DOS machines.

Before 10 years ago it was used heavily in PC hardware development and testing. Basically DOS as a bootloader that gives you full access to the computer hardware. Windows had too many things going on in the background to give that control plus the driver development is not so easy. These days Linux seems the answer since you have the source code and can trim it down to the minimal needed for control. I'd have killed for a networking file system for DOS back then. I think we ended up using something like a lap link protocol to transfer files from my development system to the test systems.

Re: EtherDFS – The Ethernet DOS File System

#10

Not a problem most of us have in 2017. I wonder what the use case is for having a bunch of DOS machines.

DOS (without or with older hardware) is great for hardware hacking, e.g. it's trivial to write code to directly access hardware and find out how it works; the information can then be used to e.g. implement a linux driver. Note that performance is also very good as well, e.g. for bit-banged I/O just disable interrupts for minimal latency and maximum throughput.

Also for simple network-attached embedded devices that have to be ultra-reliable, there isn't much to go wrong.

Post reply on HN