I finally got the source listings of the basic programs that I can now look at. I did download gw-basic as suggested but it wouldn't run at all on this computer. It probably runs on IBM compatible PC's but it may be trying to access memory occupied by the ROM basic since this is a true IBM PC. I am not saying this in a snobby way at all but my reading of articles about the eighties-era IBM PC's said that this was one of the major differences between an IBM PC and a so-called IBM clone. In all other ways the clones and the PC's were functionally the same. Now that I got the null-modem cable working, the mode ctty comx command works as it should with x being your com port number. I certainly could have been able to mechanize the mass getting of the source but for one huge problem which is also at the heart of a lot of accessibility issues. The video screen buffer is about as far from a standard output device as one can get in that once a program takes to writing all output there, any kind of mechanized operation stops dead. It's like running a farm in which one hope to sell the milk from one's herd of cattle but they got made in to beautiful steaks and nice juicy Bamberger patties before they could get to the milking machines, sort of an udder failure, one might say. I could use the ctty com1 command from DOS and immediately see the DOS prompt on the serial terminal so then one goes to that keyboard and you can run DOS commands from your unix box and capture the in-bound text with no trouble. One could use a program like expect or write some code in C or perl and get one machine to control the other. Then, you call basic and the whole world stops because basic just writes to the screen unless there is a magic flag one could send to basic to tell it to write to true standard output. If there is such a flag, I don't know about it so I would do ctty com1 and the serial part dies right there and I hear the screen reader come alive and give the basic screen. There is another neat command in dos that partly helps. You can use the mode command to reroute the parallel printer printer port to one of the serial ports and I did that. Now, I could get somewhere. I could type new from the PC to clear basic's buffer and then type load "x10.bas" When you are running basic, the function keys are programmed to do commands such as load, run and or save and there's a LPT1 button. Since I rerouted LPT1 to com1, I could type list and then hit LPT1 and low and behold, it spewed out on the serial line and I could capture every last character. Unix is just so much easier once one gets the hang of things. This Summer marks the 34TH year since I first layed hands on a unix system which was a DEC Ultrix installation at Oklahoma State University. Unix turned out to be the best job I every ended up having. Martin McCormick _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list