Laplink
Laplink is a program from the manufacturer of the same name for direct data transfer between two computers for DOS and Windows .
It was especially popular in the 1980s because it was one of the few ways to exchange large amounts of data between two computers. The Universal Serial Bus (USB) had not yet been invented, network interfaces were hardly widespread in the private sector and data exchange via floppy disks was slow and tedious because of the low capacity of the disks. The software could only copy data between two computers. The transmission takes place via the serial or parallel interface . A suitable cable was included with the software.
The importance of the program has decreased considerably, since almost all PCs are now equipped with network interfaces and newer operating systems have already integrated functions for data transmission ( e.g. Ethernet cabling with network shares ). Large amounts of data can also be exchanged without any problems using USB sticks . This means that there is no need for special transmission cables or pure data copying programs. Accordingly, the company offers other copy programs, namely in particular for backing up and restoring entire computers and for transferring installed programs including all settings.
From MS-DOS version 6.00 onwards , device drivers ( INTERLNK.EXE and INTERSVR.EXE ) that were specially developed by Microsoft and required for data exchange were also supplied . IBM delivered the drivers with PC DOS 5.02. You had to make suitable cables yourself or obtain them from specialist retailers.