Huh. I was supporting myself by buying cheap NE2000 clones and doing installs for students wanting onto the campus Ethernet. It took me a while to figure out th

Huh. I was supporting myself by buying cheap NE2000 clones and doing installs for students wanting onto the campus Ethernet. It took me a while to figure out the first one, but after that the DOS-mode packet drivers and Winsock were a lot less finicky than Win95's. 95 always wanted you to clear IP assignments, reboot, then assign the (static) IP you were supposed to have. Then reboot again for it to take effect. And it rarely seemed to work the first time you did that process. With most non-new PC's being a bit anemic for 95 at the time, especially all the disk activity, I was happy on 3.11 for several more years. I tried 95B on my 486-66, but was never really happy with the performance. I was happy with packet drivers on the campus network and the wonderful ETHERPPP package that did all the dial, connect, handshake stuff and then emulated a packet driver if I was stuck needing dialup (which, considering I was still using a 14.4k modem because I had no need for dialup speed most of the time, was not ideal). You could use the NCSA Telnet (+ ftp, etc.) software for DOS, and seamlessly start using Winsock in Windows (or native TCP/IP with WfW 3.11) without a reboot. But I'm sure that built-in, especially for dialup, was far easier for ISP's to support.