386i DOS windows

[Glenn Roberts]

> <on the Sun 386i> .. "Can DOS windows be opened via telnet, or
> even over serial lines?  I know that DOS can handle a standard
> ANSI display mode, so this doesn't sound too far fetched. 

You can have multiple DOS sessions on the 386i (I just telnetted into my
machine and ran dos -w to test this .. works fine).  The problem is that
the guy who telnets in can't do much that's useful.  The telnet session
can't handle memory mapped screen I/O so forget about using any kind of
spreadsheet or word processor and most database packages.  I haven't tried
loading the ANSI driver, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't work over the
telnet session, besides I don't know of too many DOS packages that make
use of it.  If all you want to do is compilations or some other line
oriented work (edlin?) that should work fine.  Note that DOS is a CPU hog
on the 386i - simply entering text into a file via edlin pegs the CPU
meter at 100% on my machine so performance with two active DOS sessions
would probably be lousy.

- Glenn Roberts, The MITRE Corp., McLean VA (703) 883-6820
  gfr at cobra.mitre.org