As part of some sort of legal record-keeping thing, my father's business lawyers has requested a copy of the database of customers from a work computer. The core issue is that this work computer is a circa 1988 AOpen…thing, running what looks to be a modified version of DOS 5.0.
I'm very weak with actual MS-DOS, and older hardware in general, but after some fuddling around I finally found the file that the lawyer needed. The issue comes that the customer "database" (read: space delimited text file) is ~3MB big. This is too big for one floppy, and the data is in one single file, which, to my very limited knowledge of actual DOS, would preclude me splitting it with the built-in programs on the computer.
Checking the back of the computer, I noted 1 built-in serial port, a parallel port in an expansion slot, and somewhat inexplicably, a NIC with a jack in it too big to be RJ-11. I didn't test if it was actually a RJ-45 as I didn't have an ethernet cable handy at the time. However, the two program files that I would have used (according to my research) to use the serial are nowhere to be found on the computer. Furthermore, I haven't the slightest idea what I would do to leverage the NIC.
Furthermore complicating issues, just pulling the HDD has to be relegated to a last resort, as the computer (which is older than I am) is used for daily business operations and would have to be taken offline for around 1 day due to the distance between the computer and me, which the "client" does not particularly want.
So the crux of my question is, with my almost none existent skill in DOS (I accidentally corrupted one of the "databases", and would have been in bad shape if I didn't make a backup beforehand), is there a simple way I can leverage the above-mentioned assets (or something else I don't know about DOS) to get this 3 meg file off of the computer without pulling the HDD?
Best Answer
Try using PKZip. It's an old DOS utility that provided some of the earliest zip file capability. You should be able to download it at http://wiki.oldos.org/Downloads/MSDOS. If the database is a text file, then PKZip should let you compress enough to get onto a floppy disk, or if not, then it should allow spanning of multiple disks. At that point, your main issue is getting from the floppy onto a more modern computer. I don't remember the syntax for PKZip, but I do remember that it does have very good help built in to show you exactly how to zip up and unzip files. I recommend version 2.04g from the downloads as that was universally regarded as the best version for many years.