Most of the programs that used the twisty wire special parallel cables were not networking applications. They supported file transfer between two machines having a special user program on each end that supported the file transfer. There were a number of packages including...

Laplink
BrooklynBridge
Trans
Fastlynx

Then there was the much more sophisticated XTreeLink program which was designed to make the disk drives of a remote machine appear as drive letters on local machine. This was done over similar types of parallel port cables (defaulting to use FastLynx type cables). Using this scheme allowed the user to select which program they wanted to use to transfer the files. XTree Company of course hoped that they used XTreeGold for that purpose. It was even possible to open files on the remote computer with your word processor or database utility. When I wrote that program for XTree I even made it be possible to use it between machines that ran different versions of DOS including the various DrDOS versions.

You could consider the implementation that I did a type of networking. The programs listed above, in that time (late '80s early '90s) could not rightfully be called networking programs. Maybe later versions did after the demise of XTree Company when bought out by Central Point Software.

Michael Karas