Orinoco
Orinoco Based Cards, which the most popular ones being the Lucent WaveLAN and Orinoco Gold, have a distinct advantage in that their drivers are easier to obtain, but can be a bit more bulky to setup. Also, there is no Windows For Workgroups 3.11 support if you were wanting that (I don't really use that much anymore so not a dealbreaker for me). These chips come in 2 varieties: Silver, and Gold. The Silver cards are basic 802.11b WiFi Cards with no encryption capabilities outside of WEP, Orinoco Gold cards however, can be used with WPA-PSK in Windows 98 and above though with 3rd party Wireless management software (and maybe a Firmware upgrade). In DOS they work fairly well but it seems all of them have that plastic piece that sticks out of the side that acts as an antenna - which is a double edged sword. On one hand, you get better reception and don't need the AP next to your laptop, but in the other hand you have a big chunk hanging out so if you are one of those lucky souls like me who actually has a 486 laptop or two with still working NiMH Batteries, you'll need to be careful because you can knock that puppy into walls and stuff while carrying your vintage laptop around.

Agere
The #1 Agere based cards are the Cisco Aironet 340/350 series cards. These cards come in two types, and they also come in Cardbus and apparently other types that look similar so be careful. The first type is the typical PCMCIA card - with model numbers that start with PMC (PMC-340, PMC-350), the other type start with LMC and are the type mainly intended to be used dwith a special Antenna (LMC-352, LMC-350). The way to make sure that they are A PCMCIA version is to look for the "PCMCIA" Logo on the back of the card, and there should also be a second sticker on the back above the label with all the cert logos and product numbers that says something lik LMC-352 AIR America - or something like that. These cards work with pretty much ALL major operating systems up to and including Windows XP. So if you want WiFi in Windows For Workgroups 3.11, these are the cards to do it with. In Plain DOS they are also the least memory hogging and easiest to setup. They can also use WPA-PSK if you are running Windows 98 or later, upgrade the Firmware to a compatible version, and if you use a 3rd party Wireless Management Utility.

Agere
Cisco's DOS Drivers are VERY hard to get your hands on as Cisco tends to like to lock their drivers down like they are made out of gold. To get them the "official" way means making some kind of account with Cisco and then finding the drivers in their database - which can be tricky if they have not removed them yet. It's easier to just ask around the Vintage Computing community for them and you can find them.

The driver-set for the Aironet cards consists of CSCPKT w/ associated INI file, WEPDOS, RADINFO, PCMCIA enable/disable utility, and a few other utilities that I don't really use.

PCMCIA Switches are -ON and -OFF. You want to specify because the default is -OFF. You can tell if this command works because the Recieve/Transmit lights on the card will come on if you use "PCMCIA -ON" and the ports are off.

RADINFO can be used to check on the card if the PCMCIA slots are in an "on" state. This will allow you to see information about the card that may be useful in determining why or why not it's working, or why your network kkeeps kicking it off (because there's no WPA, DUH!).

WEPDOS This is the utility used to create a Wireless Key using the WEP Security protocol, which is MAYBE one step above nothing at all. I actually don't really use it TBH. But I figured I'd offer so some Armchair infosec wannabe does not go sending me nastygrams to my e-mail box about running a vintage computer wireless and how someone could put a bitcoin miner on my DOS box and I would not know about it (hehehehe, yeah right, then I'd just hack it, seize it and start mining my OWN bitcoin, lol).

CSCPKT.EXE - This is the actual packet driver for the Aironet card that you will NEED to use. You DON'T need Card Services loaded for it to work. Since PCMCIA is a standard, it's able to setup the PCMCIA system on it's own automatically, saving memory, and allowing for the card to work without loading 9 more lines of crap into your AUTOEXEC.BAT to make it work. It has an associated Configuration file called CSCPKT.INI, which is the file in which you set the SSID you are connecting to, the hostname of your DOS machine, speed limits, bandwidth limits, base address of the card, IRQ, whether or not the card is allowed to determine those settings on it's own.