Good thing there was lots of beer and wine available.
Although mostly, I drank root beer.
We went down saturday to a house built in the high country near Pine Mountain, Georgia because our friends had installed Direcway two-way satellite "high-speed" internet...and the way it comes in is to one PC, via a USB connector...and these folks have two machines in their home office plus a laptop. They ran Windows 98.
So, after much web-perusing, I determined that if they have Windows 98 Second Edition (whatever that is), they should be able to share and do NAT (Network address translation) through a built-in Microsoft utility called Internet Connection Sharing (an apt name).
And from what I could determine, it's a pain to configure.
Did I mention I'm a Mac person?
So I ran out to an Office Depot in Atlanta and picked up a cheap 10/100 Ethernet card (one of the machines had none), a cheap Speedstream Wireless-plus-switch, and a cheap 802.11 PC Card for their laptop...and 25 feet of Cat 5, and we set off for South o'here.
Got there around mid-afternoon, discovered to our relief that indeed they had Windows 98 Second Edition (and hey, the laptop had Windows 2000) and I spent, well, several hours fighting with the systems....installing ICS, installing networking in general, and configuring the wireless/switch (which really worked perfectly right out of the box.)
Through it all, my beat up Titanium Powerbook was an invaluable testing tool (it recognized the wireless 2 seconds after it was powered up) and reference library (I had downloaded several PDFs and FAQs from such fine sources as the dslreports.com Satellite FAQ.
Number one timewaster and pain in the butt? You had to reboot Windows 98 after any and I mean any change you made in the networking config stuff. Agggghh!