Getting DOS onto a modern-ish network is the kind of problem that sounds simple until you are staring at an unidentified PCI network card and an operating system that predates most of the hardware in the machine. Georg Potthast’s SIOUX pages exist for exactly that unpleasant afternoon.
Visit Georg Potthast’s SIOUX pages
The site became known in DOS and FreeDOS circles for packet drivers: small pieces of software that let DOS networking programs talk to Ethernet hardware. Potthast collected drivers for PCI network adapters and provided tools for identifying what chipset a card actually used.
One of the important utilities is NICSCAN.EXE. FreeDOS documentation specifically points users to Potthast’s site for NICSCAN and explains the practical reasoning behind it: different retail network-card models often use the same underlying chipset, so hunting for a driver by the exact name printed on the box can be a waste of time. Identify the chipset first, then find the appropriate packet driver.
That is old-computer troubleshooting in one sentence.
The FreeDOS networking guides still reference SIOUX when explaining how to bring up Ethernet. A typical configuration loads a packet driver from AUTOEXEC.BAT, often using software interrupt 0x60, and then hands networking off to software such as mTCP, WatTCP-based applications, FTP clients, DHCP tools, or browsers.
Potthast’s pages are especially interesting because they sit at the boundary between two eras. DOS networking started in a world of ISA cards, dial-up connections, Novell stacks, and carefully assigned interrupts. The SIOUX material helped extend that world into PCI Ethernet and USB hardware that arrived much later.
In other words, the site is not merely preserving obsolete drivers. It documents the work required to make an obsolete operating system cooperate with hardware it was never designed to understand.
That has practical value in 2026. Retrocomputing increasingly involves real machines rather than emulators alone. Moving files, reaching an FTP server, connecting an old PC to a local network, or simply proving that a 486 can still speak TCP/IP often depends on exactly this kind of forgotten middleware.
Modern vendor support pages are usually useless here. The card manufacturer moved on twenty years ago. The operating system vendor is gone or irrelevant. The useful answer survives because one person collected the ugly little .COM files and wrote down how to use them.
That is the old Web doing technical support after everyone with a budget stopped caring.