Another possible option is Trumpet Winsock and Netscape. Older machines may have problems connecting at baud rates higher than 9600. Many machines were originally shipped with the high performance serial ports installed. If you do not have the newer chip, serial port upgrade cards are available. But, the easiest alternative is to use an internal modem instead.
Internal modems bypass the serial ports.
Netscape will not start unless I am already online. Previously, I could use an earlier version of Netscape and browse web pages on my machine while offline. Put this file in the Netscape install directory. When you want to go online, you can start Trumpet, etc. which will load the original winsock.dll from the Windows directory, and then you can browse online. Yes, many older shareware packages are still available.