🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm thinking of using a dos network to link two or three PCs that
are used in a scientific lab for data collection. I want to be able
to send short messages from one machine to another like "start," "stop",
and "what's happenin." All of the machines are running software that
I wrote, so what I'm interested in is incorporating the network
interface into my own code.

Artisoft and several other vendors recommend using NETBIOS interface.
It seems like a good approach, because NETBIOS is fairly simple, and 
seems to be supported on most pc lans. Most of what I know about
netbios comes from the article in Jan '89 BYTE and from the IBM Tech
Ref for the PC network.

Now the questions:
Is netbios a reasonable way to interchange short text messages among a small
set of machines?
Are there other good sources of info on netbios programming?
Are there any good libraries for netbios programming?
Are there any small example netbios apps?
Does anyone have the source code for the example netbios app from the
Brett Glass article in Byte? (It is available on BIX, but I'm not a BIXer.)
Does anyone know how to bridge any of the small peer-to-peer dos networks
to a Unix/tcp/ip/nfs network?

Thanks

Kaare Christian
kc@rna.rockefeller.edu