To begin with, I had to research what hardware might have functioning DOS drivers (yeah, the laptop could dual boot to Windows 98, but that would be much more hassle than the CF card).

But is it even possible to get a DOS laptop on a WiFi network in 2019? But the laptop is portable, and it’s in a corner of the house where there’s no Ethernet socket nearby. The laptop is of course old enough that it has no built-in Ethernet or WiFi, although it has two PCMCIA/CardBus (at least I believe they’re also functional as CardBus) slots. Moving data to the laptop on a CF card with a PCMCIA adapter is not difficult, but it gets old it would be really handy to have the laptop on the network, accessing the home NAS via either SMB or NFS. My need was seemingly simple: I set up an old ThinkPad 760XL (166 MHz Pentium MMX) running DOS for my son to play 1990s games on, especially but not exclusively Sierra and LucasArts adventures for that purpose, the laptop is quite suitable, it has a decent ESS sound chip and a CD-ROM. The upshot is that until the early 2000s, there was demand for DOS networking drivers for then-current hardware. The trouble is that IEEE 802.11b equipment appeared when DOS was almost gone from home and corporate PCs, although it still survived as a “pre-boot” environment for running Norton Ghost, Partition Magic, Drive Image, and similar products. The IEEE 802.11b standard came out in 1999, specified a 11 Mbps signaling rate, and it’s about the oldest not totally obsolete wireless networking standard. But WaveLAN was only the precursor to IEEE 802.11 and it is completely incompatible with IEEE-standard networking equipment. NCR’s WaveLAN was available in 1990 and of course supported DOS.

Wireless networking has a long history, longer than most people realize.

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