I know there are still some blind dos users.  I recently got a new one. 
It is a bit different then the machines with which old dos users might be 
familiar.

It is small, the mother board is a 4 inch square.  It has tons of 
connectivity with all the expected ports plus network and usr ports.

It uses a flash chip as the hard drive.  Needless to say access times to 
run applications and write to it are much faster then other hard drives. 
A conventional drive including floppy and cd can also be used if I had 
chosen.  Because it uses a wall wart for a power supply there are no moving 
parts at all and no noise.  Any failure in the future will not be 
mechanical such as a hard drive buying the farm.

It is 500 mhz so no problem with having to use a slow down utility to use 
some old dos programs.  I have on hand many of the familiar dos programs 
including ocr if I choose to use them.  I use it primarily to connect via a 
sireal port to my mac machine where I run unix applications in the mac os 
and connect to the internet via the same route.

I use dos speech via an external synth and dosscreen reading software. 
This provides the powerand level of control of dos screen reading that has 
yet to be reached by any gui based os.  There is a generation of blind 
users who have never known dos and don't realize how powerful speech in it 
was and what they are missing.

At the same time all this can be happening while the mac is active.  I can 
turn to it and do any mac task.  The same using windows should be as easy. 
The host machine doesn't even know another machine is connected and active 
at the same time.

                                XB
                                 IC|XC


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