I've actually wanted to do this with my DOS computer for a while... take out the hard drives, and just have a CF slot on the front of the computer hooked straight into the main IDE channel. Then I could just have a CF card with an MS-DOS install, another with Win 98, and another with OS/2 for whatever reason. These days it's hard to find good deals on compact flash though, as the format is largely obsolete.
Well, I lived through the early days of the internet on Win 3.1, and it was NOT fun... screwing around with Trumpet Winsock and such. I gladly would have lived entirely from the DOS command line, except Netscape only worked in WindowsIf you have Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, apparently it's not bad at all. But dealing with DOS drivers is just icky. You might as well try a null modem cable if you go that way - not that I had much success with that either.
--Zero