Question

I have a very very old PC that is running DOS and using an ISA card to receive the data from an old fashioned testing device. What I want to do is attach the Printer (LPT) wire to the old PC and attach another PC with linux to the other side of the wire. The linux pc should behave like its a printer device so it can receive the data which should be printed. Following up I want to interpret this data,…

Answer 1

You basically don’t even need linux on the other machine.

There is something called the INTERLNK and INTERSVR that comes bundled with MSDOS.

You can use that to make the file sharing work from DOS using a parallel port.

Here is a guide that connects two PCs in DOS mode.

http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-interlink.html

Considering your PC is quite old, this might not work for you because INTERNK and INTERSVR are available with MSDOS 6.22 and later versions only.

I would suggest to use a bootable floppy to get the correct MSDOS version and use this technique- fairly simple guide link above.

P.S: Make sure you have the correct wires – You can read the “whole” discussion in comments here to understand what wire can be used for what.

http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/dcc-connection-in-dos/16366.html

Hope this helps!