Thanks for the suggestions. If I can load files onto a USB drive from a DOS environment and transfer them to a machine where I can burn them to DVD I've solved the main problem.
Apart from the doorstops kicking around here I have two DOS machines: one is a '586 running DOS 6.22 / WFW 3.11 and the other a PII running Novell DOS 7 - mostly out of curiosity. No need for peripherals: Got parallel ports on both and lots of parallel printers. Serial mouse on the 586, PS2 on the PII.
I haven't found a way to make either one drive a CDRW. Read, yes, write, no. I have Adaptec burning software but the drives it knows about I don't have, and they were SCSI back in those days anyway. I gave away my Philips CDRW 800 some time ago. Duh.
So read floppy to disk, write to USB, transfer USB to machine with DVD-write capabilities is the intended workflow. This after I burned up a drive using one of those USB drive-controllers. A quiet pop, a small puff of smoke, and goodbye Maxtor... Damn!
-CH-