@Ozymandias,
A simple search in your favoured search engine for "MS-DOS" networking will yield 100s of links, so there is no shortage of information on this relatively ancient and forgotten dark art.
Here's a couple to get you going:
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http://www.jacco2.dds.nl/samba/dos.html
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http://www.kompx.com/en/network-setup-i ... client.htm
The principles of setting up networking were/are relatively straightforward:
1. Set up the network (Work Group) on your Host Computer
2. Get the MS-DOS Client to communicate with it - The above mentioned sites (and others) should get you started on that quest.
You do have to understand that you are delving into an era when most computer management (and programming) was undertaken using a solely text based approach on 80 character screens, similar to working entirely using what we might now consider to be the 'Command Line'. MS-DOS, and its equivalents, PC-DOS etc., were an attempt to make that keyboard interface between the human side an the electronics more 'user-friendly'. However, that target 'user' was, in general, probably a university computing graduate and/or business/education user by definition, because real home computing for most people was simply unaffordable and unattractive, i.e. a 'real' IBM desktop computer (or an early Apple Mac) might easily have cost £5,000 (5,000-10,000 USD) in the 1980's for a system with 640Kb of RAM and a 20-40Mb Hard Drive. Business and University computers mostly used the CP/M Operating System, and the only commercial software most people were aware of were Wordstar, Lotus 123 and DBase, which would have cost around £1,200-1,500 (2,500 USD) per PC. No usable 'Windows' software really existed until those apps were ported to DOS, and some games started to appear, primarily to demonstrate the improved graphics capabilities of evolving hardware (still primitive by today's standards). Also, looking at the early list you provided of what you like to do with an MS-DOS VM, you are likely to be sadly disappointed if working purely in DOS: Few graphics applications were available and those that were had to be developed in Assembly Language/Machine Code; no Internet existed that would be recognisable by today's users - It was basically for text only communication, or for transmitting (transferring) data across closed telecoms systems until the mid-late 1990s. No software download sites or recognisable graphical Websites existed, nor were there any real/usable Web Browsers until the release of Netscape in 1994, which was a proprietary (commercial) program.