[Ham-Computers] The NET USE Construct

[Robert Downs]

When my company was bought out many years ago, I inherited the dBase for DOS
commercial accounting package that I had bought for the company to use.  It
has been extensively modified and optimized to keep up with the vintage US
military radios that were my hobby and then my business after the new owner
laid off me and most of my people.  I have literally hundreds of hours
invested in customizing it and no wish to get by with anything commercially
available.  Under or in Windows NT up through XP I used the Net Use
construct to reassign the DOS LPT1 and LPT2 printer outputs (recognized by
the dBase software) to a USB printer for checks and a network printer for
everything else.  And we all lived happily for 19 years.  Then either the
system board or the CPU failed in my last XP machine and I was forced to
bite the bullet and buy a Windows 10 machine.  Fortunately, knowing that
this was going to happen someday, I already had a DOS Virtual Machine
optimized for dBase For DOS  on hand.  However, I had never until now needed
to use it and it does not seem to have been written to handle two (or more)
network printers.

 

I never knew (and it didn't matter before) whether the NET USE functions
were a part of the Windows OS or part of the MSDOS subsystem.  But in any
case, the commands don't appear to work with the new system, which I think
calls the start-up batch file after the Virtual Machine  starts.  And the VM
doesn't know what to do with them.

 

So can anyone tell me whether or not the function still exists in WIN 10 or
not?  It apparently doesn't exist in the VM.

 

Robert Downs