>I was wondering if anyone knows of a simple program around that would
    >allow basic 'talking' on the PC serial port using DOS.

If you (still) have basica (or GWBASIC), it has quite good support for the
com ports (1 and 2, anyway.)  Very early in the PC's life, I wrote a
termnial emulator/file transfer program in a combination of assembler and
basica (the assembler does the terminal emulation, basica does user
interface, configuration, and file transfers (xmodem.)  If the assembler
part is missing, the basica will do "dumb terminal" as well, but not all
that well...

I'd be willing to post or make this FTPable if anyone is interested.

The "commercial" version of this program, which might have been a worthy
competitor of Crosstalk I, crashed and burned for business reasons :-(

BillW