This IBM PC XT boots the BASIC-DOS 80-Column Demo diskette and runs a single 80x25 session on the Color Display, with its parallel port (LPT1) connected to the Printer pane, which shows everything the machine prints. BASIC-DOS’s printer device, PRN, is LPT1.
Type LPRINT "Hello from LPT1", or enter a few program lines and type LLIST, or run CALENDAR (one of the PC DOS 1.00 samples) and choose a year to print a two-month-per-page calendar. Since the Printer pane is plain text, it shows control characters by name (eg, <ESC> for the escape sequences that CALENDAR sends to IBM’s printer) and the printer’s block graphics characters as asterisks.
Press any key at the boot prompt (or wait 2 seconds) to start the diskette, or press Esc to boot from the hard disk instead.
If there’s no printer (eg, on a machine without a parallel port), LPRINT, LLIST, and PRINT # to PRN report “Device timeout”, as in Microsoft BASIC.
Copyright (c) 2020-2026 Jeff Parsons Released under MIT License