My main problem is that I do not have any more CGA, EGA, or HGA monitors anymore. I know I can put together an interface if I have to to change the TTL video signal levels to a more current VGA standard, but I need to order some 2N2222A transistors and standard carbon-film resistors to implement the change in video levels. Thankfully I still have some of the old ISA vidcards also stored away or it would be even more of a burden.
Network cards are another problem, since some are so old that the old DOS drivers are unlocatable at the moment. I might have some 3COM 3C905C ISA cards possibly that I can set up, however. The main stumbling block is that all modern network routers no longer have the old BNC connectors and only come with the RJ45 ports instead. Have to look and see if I have some older models put away instead, although I would be leery of using them for any sustained length of time.
Your networking difficulties are one of the reasons I stuck with the 98SE OS: it supports the USB standard, so other peripherals can be connected with only minor difficulties. Generic drivers are our friends. W95bOSR2 only had partial support, and that was always Plug 'N Pray from what I recall working with it. DOS 5.0, and WFW 3.11 still work quite well for quite a few things, and you would be surprised at how well a ripple counter, shift register and serial-to-parallel interface with a higher default bus speed work when you have reconfigured the system for more speed.
Other older OS's are also quite handy to use -did you know that Red hat 5.0 requires 8MB minimum of memory on a 386 for a useable GUI, but only 4 megs for a CLI? I am using it now on a machine that is one of several hooked up to a central server. It runs its own OS and transfers the text files to the main server out of the cluster for uploads and downloads. Really, for texting you only need the CLI -and an 8MHz machine has absolutely no problems with that. Think of a Beowolf cluster for comparison: the main machine is busily processing its Computer Aided Mechanical Stress analysis on some designs while I type away on this lowly x86 for posting and only transmit the finished text file for uploading to FR when I am done. Gotta love the simplicity, struth!
“Network cards are another problem, since some are so old that the old DOS drivers are unlocatable at the moment. I might have some 3COM 3C905C ISA cards possibly that I can set up, however.”
Download the MS dos client here.
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/BusSys/Clients/MSCLIENT/
You can edit a couple files to enable sharing.
It includes drivers for many ISA network cards that were common at the time.
Many with a 10baseT interface.
Just select the card you got, the card configuration, and the setup program does the rest.
With those disk, you will be able to set up a network file server with an 8088 with 640k ram.
Forgot to mention: with USB on that OS you can access wireless cards and devices, not to mention hard drives that were at least 30x larger than was available at the time. And SD cards, Memory Modules, USB-powered Optical Scanners, etc.