You should not do this if you are someone whose afraid of security, or doesn't feel like learning how to connect your PC properly to a network. If you're the type who is prone to call for "Microsoft Antivirus Team" phone scams, or believing those little blue pills in a spam e-mail will actually arrive to you, then you should probably just stick with DOSBox.

PC/XT/8088 era stuff - The earliest PC's are limited to 10mbps over ethernet due to a function of BUS speed, and this limitation runs up the chain to the early-mid era 486 as well (Pre- PCI Slots). A lot of 8-bit Network Interface Cards don't even have an RJ-45 Ethernet port on them, rather having an AUI, or BNC port, so if looking to network your XT, don't be surprised if you need an AUI to Ethernet adapter to use that old 3Com card fro 1986. Almost every single 8088 era machine I had, used a 16-bit card in "8-bit mode" - which is something that can be as simple as just plugging in the network card to an 8-bit slot and making sure to configure your memory address and IRQ to fall within the 8 IRQ limitation of these early machines (before the cascaded 8253 setup that gave us 16 IRQs on the PC AT and later). Network software is limited to Microsoft LAN Client/Manager 3.0 (blech) or Mike Brutman's mTCP Suite. You will need a lightweight Packet Driver for DOS, and good luck on Windows, Windows 3.0 and older have to make use of the network connection running in DOS in the background.

PC AT 286 era- Again, same limits, 10mbps ethernet, but now we can use IRQ's above 7 (except 9 which is used to cascade the dual Interrupt controller chips), giving us more hardware flexibility with more devices on-board. Same limitations for Windows because Windows for Workgroups will only work with a 386SX or better PC (so if you put a 386 snap-on upgrade in your 286, which is always an SX, you can run windows for Workgroups 3.11, but the buck stops there).

The 386 era - The 386 Era is when networking on PCs started getting really good, both from Windows, DOS, and others. A 386 with FreeDOS and mTCP is a formidable and rather useful and fun machine on a modern broadband internet connection and a modern TCP/IP network. It's rather easy to use the same NICs you would in a 486 in a 386.

The 486 era - The 486 era is when things get rather complex. The 386 was the last era to use the ISA bus for everything, and the 486 was when we started worrying about bus speeds for expansion cards. A late-era 486 with PCI is capable of a 10/100 ethernet connection that will be about as fiddly as a modern on-CPU networking chipset, vs an early 486 that's ISA only and limited to the same cards that would work with anything PC that came before. You also have EISA which can offer some speed solutions, but might present issues in the adapter-side of things (or driver side), and VESA Local Bus (VLB) doesn't really offer any network cards to my knowledge. A 486 networked is a rather speedy, comfortable affair. I use my DX4-100 regularly to look at things like OpenDirectories, Bulletin Boards, and parts of the internet that are easily accessed with a TLS Compliant DOS web Browser like twibright Lab's Links browser.

But What About Wifi? - Well, any one of these systems can be connected to a WiFi Network in one of two ways: either a Wireless Bridge, like the Netgear WNCE2001 which I use in my garage linked up to a Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch on it's own VLAN, or I wire it through internet connection sharing through the ethernet jack on a modern PC connected via WiFi, which also works great since the PC is Gigabit Ethernet, and the workstation only needs 10mbps in most cases. So WiFi is doable, and this is the most secure way to achieve that. Especially the Wireles Bridge since the traffic is secured over WPA2-PSK, or some other modern security protocols.

Laptops, mostly from the 486 era and later, can be put on WiFi using any one of a number of vintage PCMCIA Type II or Type III WifI cards so as long as they are 802.11b (11mbps - again Bus Speed Limitation) compliant, but not in the usual way of clicking on your WiFi icon in Windows, selecting the SSID, and then putting in the Pre-Shared encrypted WPA2 key. See, the problem with these is they are all limited to a much older, non-compliant standard called WEP (Wired Equivalent Proxy) which is basically useless and hardly more secure than no password to your WiFi at all, so I suggest NOT downgrading to WEP unless you live in the middle of nowhere with no chance of anyone leeching your WiFi ever. What I do instead, is I use my cell phone's data plan to connect the machine over WiFi from DOS, with no security, and then lock the connection afterward (or limit it to one device) so that I can assure nobody can hijack my connection to the vintage computer on the cell phone. The beauty of this is it means I can drag my old NanTan or NEC Versa on vacation with me, and go hang around some Bulletin Boards, or download a file or driver for some new hardware I found out roaming the city, rather than wait till I go home to try it out or see if I can find it. However, one caveat you might run into, is if the standards committee for 802.11 stops supporting the wireless B protocol on portable devices, which then youre' going to be S.O.L.