waiiiit, if this LWN article is to be understood correctly (sry it's subscriber only but basically just off-handedly mentions that "DOS was needed for networking on early linux")

you could do networking by kexec(?)ing linux from DOS and Linux could re-use DOS "packet drivers" for networking??

https://lwn.net/Articles/1017846/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/TCP_Packet_Driver

@cas I rather assume that Linux lacked networking so if you wanted to fetch things from network you rebooted to DOS, connected, fetched, rebooted to Linux.

Note that Linux lacked TCP/IP networking at that time. Which was not provided by pocket drivers. They were really simple drivers between DOS and hardware.

@cas i think you could share the subscriber link

@hrw @cas It looks like there was an early ka9q port - that's a userspace tcp/ip stack which was ported to pretty much every OS - I'm assuming people did networking over serial with that to a PC or Unix box.
(I've not read the article yet since I'm not currently subscribed - but Owen was the first to show me Linux, back in the very early installation days, where installations were very very manual; but he also had the GNU tools available on the big Unix and sparc boxes; nice guy!)

@hrw @cas DOS was never well-known for TCP/IP support. TCP/IP in Windows 3.1 was quite painful, too. Linux had working network stack at that time.

@pavel @cas Well. TCP/IP in DOS was available before Linux even happened.

I never used TCP/IP in DOS - I needed packet drivers for low level Ethernet stuff.

@cas kexecing linux from DOS?
*laughs in LOADLIN.EXE*

@hrw @cas The context is really early Linux. So yeah this seems most likely interpretation of the comment on the article. Note he didn't even say TCP/IP, but "networking". It could have been NetWare for dos etc.