FreeDOS saved my bacon some years ago. I was working at a college and one day a chemistry prof came in and said their spectrometer (IIRC) was dying. I took a lo

FreeDOS saved my bacon some years ago. I was working at a college and one day a chemistry prof came in and said their spectrometer (IIRC) was dying. I took a look and found an old 386-based machine with a hard drive on the fritz. It ran some odd version of DOS from a company that no longer existed, there was no budget for a replacement, and classes relying on it were starting soon. My memory is hazy but I was able to get a compactflash card with FreeDOS on it and used it to boot the system. The special programs that operated the device over the serial or parallel port took a little work to keep from crashing, but eventually all was working as before.