Vintage Computer Festival declared on Wednesday 05 January 2005 11:19 pm:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Pete Turnbull wrote:
> > Dunno, I don't have quite such old versions :-) My old copy of "The
> > MS-DOS Bible" says "every version" -- it means 3.30 and older --
> > disallows binary reads from devices. The same message is at 5254 in
> > MS-DOS 3.30 (ditto in PC-DOS 3.30), at 4CA0 in 3.21, and 4CCC in
> > IBM-DOS 4.01 (from a Compaq). I can't read my MS-DOS 2.10 and 2.11
> > disks on the hardware I have here. "Binary reads from a device are
> > not allowed" is the message at 8753 in DR-DOS 3.41.
>
> The question I haven't seen answered yet is, "Well, why the hell
> not???"
Well, my guess would be that it has no way to determine the EOF coming
over the line, as it can't just "check the file length", unless there's
a ^Z there to indicate it. Thus, ASCII mode is needed.
Pat
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Received on Wed Jan 05 2005 - 22:35:09 GMT