some bees nest stirring, was just how much can you do with?

[Tony Baechler]

Also, I forgot to mention that I don't think DOS works very well with 
broadband, or at least I never got it to work.  Even if you find a packet 
driver for your network card and actually get the Lynx port to work, you'll 
be limited to fairly slow download speeds just due to the fact that DOS has 
memory limitations and is not multitasking.  A multitasking OS can dedicate 
a process just to downloading and has a lot better memory management.  Where 
this applies to you is getting back to things like YouTube, where you really 
can't use a graphical browser in DOS and would need to download the video 
locally.  Also, since the packet driver itself takes memory and Lynx uses 
quite a bit of memory, not to mention your screen reader needing a good 
chunk, you'll rapidly lock up your system just due to the 640 KB limitation. 
  You can load some things in upper memory and some things run in protected 
mode, but TSRs don't as I understand it and the amount of upper memory is 
also limited due to DOS limitations.  Taking the youtube-dl script, it 
requires Python.  I think there might be an ancient version of Python for 
DOS, but it's probably too old to work, and again you're back to running out 
of memory as any modern interpreter will take a lot.

As a final note, if you ever get a modern machine with a plug and play 
network card, DOS won't work with it because it won't have a static IRQ.

On 3/5/2013 1:21 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
> OK, a couple of quick thoughts, based on my own experience. Yes, you can run
> Lynx, etc from DOS. However, it's much, much slower and requires messin
> around with packet drivers and dial-up networking. Linux has that built-in
> automatically and almost always just works. I never got Lynx to run in plain
> DOS because I couldn't find a packet driver and TCP/IP software for my
> network card, which is one of the big reasons why I switched to Windows 98
> and the command prompt. The second issue is that, due to DOS memory
> limitations, the ports will have a lot less features unless they use djgpp
> and a DOS extender to get around the 640 KB limit. That's called protected
> mode and again, Linux doesn't have that limitation. Finally, Lynx at least
> used direct screen writes, so Vocal-Eyes didn't automatically read the
> screen without a set file. In Linux and Cygwin, it was able to read fine on
> its own because it used BIOS writes. Lynx in Linux is literally at least
> twice as fast as DOS as I'm sure you've seen from Shellworld.
>
> On 3/4/2013 11:03 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
>> Still if elinks and mplayer exist ported for DOS, why go through the extreme
>> mayhem of finding someone local enough to learn speakup and ora and so forth
>> to teach me in the first place?
>
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-- 
Have a good day,
Tony Baechler
tony at baechler.net