Herbert,

How many characters did you send? Maybe it is written to the file only if
an internal buffer is full.

I've send "hello world!" and upto a few hundred bytes. But if what you say
is true than the only way to get around it is to append a tail of chars
thats larger than that buffer. Which would make the whole thing even more
iffy. :-\

Luckily "type com1 file" works, showing all of the text but for the last
char - probably due to the ctrl-C I have to terminate it with.

But in DOS you can use .com programs. Just a few bytes of code is
necessary to copy bytes from com1 to stdout (terminate
if a special character is received or after maybe 1k byte is received).

:-) The whole idea is that I would be able to transfer such an initial
program to the target 'puter - by way of an executable textfile (nice trick
those executable textfiles), not even needing DEBUG.

Use debug or directly enter an ascii binary using the keyboard.

But yes, when push comes to shove entering two, maybe three rows of data
into DEBUG would work - if DEBUG is already available on the target
ofcourse. I would not want to directly enter ALT codes using the keyboard
though. Just one little mistake and its un-editable junk ...

Regards,
Rudy Wieser