Pretty sure there's at least one other thread about this on here somewhere...

Back in the day I used an Orinoco Gold card (I think rebranded as a Dell TrueMobile 1150 card) which had a frighteningly huge list of supported OS's.

I used to have a Netgear 802.11b PCMCIA card in my IBM Thinkpad 760ED that ran Win98. I used to use it to remote desktop into my XP machine at the time. I'm pretty sure it had Windows 95 drivers as well.

Lucent WaveLAN/Orinoco 802.11b wireless cards are supported by everything. I'm pretty sure if you even dropped it into a toaster it would show up on the LAN. 🤣
You can typically get a card for $5-$10 and reflash the firmware to the "gold" version which supports WEP-128 and their OEM rebrands are extremely easy to identify because they always have a black antenna cover with two LED's and an external antenna plug on the end.

Funny you mention the CF-25. Mine has a WaveLAN built in and uses the third PCMCIA slot.

Found a few of the threads I was thinking of:
16-bit PCMCIA Wireless with WPA?
Old PCI WIFI Card

+1 on the Orinoco tip. Although I've never used one myself, the Dell Truemobile 1150 was the version I used pretty much when WiFi had just become a consumer technology. The original (grey, M5757) Apple AirPort Base Station has an Orinoco card in it but I don't know how easy they are to find. Having written that I just looked on ebay and there's one in America for 5 bucks 'buy it now'.

I like to use Ethernet to wifi converters for OSes with no modern wireless drivers. Just use the wired driver. This does not work well for public wifi though because you need an XP computer to run the app that configures the device, or at the very least use a web interface to select the wi-fi Network you want to connect to. These web interface configuration utilities aren't always the most intuitive to use if you know what I mean. Here is a link to one on Amazon:

IOGEAR Universal Ethernet to Wi-Fi N Adapter
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004UAKCS6/ref=cm_s … d_NlUQwbY6WJB86

Another one:

Wifi Bridge Dongle Wireless
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005OIB6XI/ref=cm_s … d_.nUQwbQ4E13F1

The best thing about these is full WPA2 support in Windows 95! Even DOS!

I accidentally found a Linksys WPC11 v3 sitting in one of my desk drawers at work and tried to install in my extremely boring Satellite T2135CS, which failed (drivers from https://www.wireless-driver.com/linksys-wpc11 … s-b-pc-adapter/).

The driver for W95 was for hardware v1 and v3 has no W95 driver. The W95 driver install utility graciously tried to accept whatever it found in the winXP install package subdirectory for v3, but the driver "failed to load" anyway. But then there is this: http://www.netstumbler.org/netstumbler/wpc11- … in95-t7759.html

Is that first post by someone very confused, or is there indeed a W95 driver for WPC11 v3 in existence?

Now that the thread is alive again...

WaveLAN was mentioned much earlier in the thread. Its perhaps worth noting that there are two very different types of WaveLAN hardware out there.

The first kind, the original WaveLAN, really does support basically all the network stacks from the mid 90s. There are NDIS2 and ODI drivers for DOS 5.0+ and Windows for Workgroups, plus NDIS3 drivers for Windows 95 and NT. There might be a packet driver too though if not shims would allow the ODI or NDIS2 driver to be used. They come in PCMCIA, ISA and MCA variants.

Problem is this hardware predates 802.11 WiFi and does not interoperate with 802.11 hardware at all - it can only talk to other WaveLAN hardware including dedicated WaveLAN Access Points. Epson, Hitachi, NEC and DEC all sold this WaveLAN hardware. DECs stuff was branded as RoamAbout DS which I've got a small box of somewhere that I really ought to put to use someday. A couple of PC Cards, and an access point which is a bit odd as it doesn't actually have a built-in radio - instead you put one of the PC cards in it (doesn't have to be a RoamAbout PC card either - any WaveLAN or RangeLAN2 PC Card will do apparently). Drivers for RoamAbout hardware (may work for other WaveLAN hardware too) can be found here.

Later on when 802.11 was ratified in the late 90s Lucent reused the WaveLAN brand for a line of standard 802.11 WiFi hardware which was eventually renamed ORiNOCO. These appear to have a 16bit ODI driver (Netware / IPX) and a Packet driver for DOS, plus NDIS drivers for Windows 9x and NT. No DOS or Windows for Workgroups NDIS drivers though with shims you might be able to get away with the 16bit ODI driver. Drivers for this hardware can currently be found here.

Later on when 802.11 was ratified in the late 90s Lucent reused the WaveLAN brand for a line of standard 802.11 WiFi hardware which was eventually renamed ORiNOCO.

These can also be found with different names. My one is branded Avaya Wireless and works really well with these drivers.