Ad-hoc connectivity on DOS machines

Laplink serial/lpt cables are non standard crossover cables that are especially designed for file transfer. You can buy them on ebay. Also you can make your own laplink cables.

Connect the two computers using a null modem cable or a LapLink (parallel-parallel) cable. The latter is preferable as it is faster. Ensure that the parallel ports of both machines are set to (in order of preference) ECP, EPP, Bi-directional (PS/2) or Standard mode.

Download interlnk

On one machine (server) run

INTERSVR.EXE

On another machine (client), edit C:\config.sys

DEVICE=INTERLNK.EXE

After starting intersvr on server machine, reboot the client computer to connect it to the intersvr. On the client machine additional drive letters will appear.

Also it's possible to bootstrap the interlnk on the server machine itself. Connect the COM1 serial ports of both machines with a null modem cable (cannot use parallel port for this). On the client run the command INTERSVR /RCOPY

On the server type the following two commands:

MODE COM1:2400,N,8,1,P
CTTY COM1

INTERSVR.EXE and INTERLNK.EXE will now be copied to the CWD of the server.

Tutorial here

Link maven works on Windows95 or later.

You will need Windows 32bit machine with Link maven installed, copy

C:\program files\link maven\DRemote.exe

to dos machine

Run programs on both system and start transferring files.

You can read about it here.