Numbered.!!!!! Indeed..!!! I fully suspect that we will soon see the PC machines change so the old type of BIOS support is gone and DOS will not even able to boot by the conventional means.

** Why would they do this? ***

To make machines that are almost all USB supported and the USB support becomes the BIOS. What we know as parallel ports, serial ports, network ports, disk ports etc etc etc etc will disappear and the function of the old BIOS will become moot. DOS will die with that process. So you all better keep at least one old machine dust free and in working order. (I keep 3 of them....an open case 486/DX100 and a 386SX/25 notebook and a Pent100 Notebook....all with DOS for....support of old tool sets, quick projects that are best done in DOS, and lastly to be able to support former clients whom invariably come around looking for support or small upgrades. (Although sometimes they give up on that. One client has me working on converting an array of PC based utility programs that I wrote in 1990-92 as DOS based and used to manage FLASH programming, config database upload/download, and remote user interface console for an embededd industrial product so that they all run on a Win32 platform). So for the moment I have my nose buried in MFC and VC++ 6.0

Michael Karas