Several people wanted additional information.  Here are some particular 
questions and ansers then those many had in common.

First:

"What programs are there in DOS, that is, for the Internet, and can you get 
broadband speeds?"

The way I use it connected to a mac it acts like a terminal to send and 
recieve information.  I use unix and linx based internet programs on the 
mac and in a couple of shell accounts to which I have access.  The speed is 
a matter of the connection speed to the internet you have on the machine to 
which the dos machine is attached.  There are still dos programs which use 
a network connection to the network so such programs could be used directly 
and browsers etc. used in dos or in shell accounts.

Second:

"may I ask what edition of DOS this uses?"

It can use any of them.  I happen to run the extended version of dr dos 
which is free and has many functions added to the original.  In fact any 
operating system that can be run on a regular pc will work on it.

Third:

Most wanted to know where it is available and the price.  There are several 
companies who sell small scale dos mother boards.  They are intended mostly 
for industrial control use and other purposes.  They however have all the 
functionality of full size machines and the port and other devices that can 
be added are like wise the same.  They come with various cpu in various 
speeds.  Most are more recent forms which require less power then older 
versions of chips.

I had concieved the idea of using one of these as the basis for a custom 
dos machine to use as I described before.  Some of them now have the option 
of using a flash chip as a hard drive so I chose one of them.  I also made 
the choice based on what I wanted to perform with it as to choice of ports 
and what devices such as drives I wanted.  It can boot from a usb port so I 
use a memory stick as a boot drive like a floppy used to do.  Mine has 3 
regular serial ports with 4 possible.  One for speech synth, one for 
connection to the mac and one goes to a modem so I can use the phone 
function scripts I have to dial out and do other phone tasks automatically.

A friend put the various parts together and in a box for me.  This is a 
sighted project only because every thing is tight and on a small scale. 
The price depends on which mother board used, how many ports it supports, 
what other devices like drives etc. it can use, the cpu speed and chips 
used and other factors.

My friend is a phd grad school student in computer science more on the 
hardware side of things .  By doing this he now has the idea he can do it 
for a few dollars if one only wants to connect to another machine as I do 
without local dos computer functions except on a small scale such as screen 
readers and connectivity software .  He says if he were to do my project 
again for others he would have to charge for his time.  Depending on 
configuration I would guess about $400.

                                XB
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