A real kludge
would have been to use a couple of printer port cards
 (which would give you 24 output lines) and a little external circuitry to
 program an EPROM. These EPROMs were not hard to program 'by hand'.
 -tony 
 the problem is not that obvious when pc's are everywhere.
 I read the data onto a floppy on said PC.  I did not own the programmer,
 so transfering it via RS232 was not that useful.  I could run a program and 
 
I think you misunderstood me. I was suggesting using a couple of IBM
parallel cards, along with ROM basic on the PC (or disk basic, or
whatever) to make a crude EPROM programmer (it would take a handful of
TTL parts). Use that to blow a BIOS image into a 'master' chip. Then copy
that on your Data-IO
-tony