An NE2000 in a box without a bunch of other ISA cards competing for IRQs isn’t too bad. A DOS packet driver is pretty plug-and-play and will open up various DOS tools for common protocols (FTP, HTTP being the most useful for file transfer).
Yeah, but anything still running and important these days (and not already virtualized) likely has one or more custom ISA cards doing undocumented things.
You could get it to work, probably, but do you want to explain to the boss why the mass spectrometer is dead because you didn’t like using the floppy?
