Start with a DX not an SX,
Can't recall the exact reasons, but we never used SX chips. It may have been that the AMD 386/486 DX chips were faster or the fact that all machines had to have the '87 coprocessor fitted because they were doing spreadsheet & database work.
In those days we were using WFW 3.1 & 'Dos for Workgroups' to network 286, 386 & 486 machines many of which had internet access. The net access was handled by a separate modem for each machine. Many of the 486 DX 2/4 66 machines were still in using WFW 3.1 when we rolled out Win98. The last of the DOS for Workgroups 286 machines were pensioned off in mid '95, I believe that all 386 machines had been Chip upgraded to AMD 486 & so continued for some time after that date.
All 486 machines had at least 8MB RAM, some had 16 (4 x 4). Everything possible was shadowed, we made extensive use of RAM drive configs. This configuration would have facilitated the winsock/tcpip stack setup. We also made extensive use of RISC based Graphics Accelerator cards.
In most cases our WFW networks co-exited alongside Novell.
In the time before WWW the internet tools were Telnet & Gopher clients. Once the WEB arrived I recall using pre 1.0 versions of Netscape ( beta 0.73 rings a bell).
As to MS Office. The preferred word version was Word for Windows 2.1 - can't remember the Excel version but I do recall that these preferences were related to resource demand.
If you want a test site for browsing with such a machine today you might try gutenberg.org as many of their pages are designed for a high level of backward compatibility.
Hope this provide some insights that will help you climb the "Wall".
Cheers
