> IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.

Kinda sorta but this misses context.

> we got long filenames

Consumers got long filenames. NT had been doing it for a couple of years. Win95 did it on FAT on a mass-market OS.

> a built-in network stack

No. Windows for Workgroups had offered that for several years. It talked NetBEUI, the Microsoft protocol, out of the box, and it also talked Novell IPX/SPX for talking to Netware, and DECnet, and HP-DLC...

But you hint at the important bit...

> no more Trumpet WinSock

Bingo. Win95 offered native 32-bit TCP/IP for the first time and it was over Ethernet.

WfWg had DOS-based 16-bit TCP/IP but only over Ethernet (or Token Ring!) It didn't have dialup networking -- at all. It couldn't talk TCP/IP over PPP, such as over a modem. WfWg 3.11 offered, only as an optional extra download, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack -- for network cards. And nobody had anything to download it over. ;-)

Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 3.x had an optional 16-bit dialup stack and optional 16-bit TCP/IP -- but that could not talk to a network card.

I know, it's prehistory, but in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, local-area networks were catching on like wildfire and by 1993 or so Microsoft noticed and made networking in Windows a standard feature.

What is overlooked today: it didn't use TCP/IP.

Nothing much did. Not even big iron or minicomputers like DEC VAX kit with VMS. TCP/IP was a Unix thing, and Unix cost $thousands just for the OS, plus $thousands more for the hardware. Even if you ran it on PCs, you needed $thousands worth of RAM. SCO Xenix was huge but for production it needed 2-4 MB of RAM, ideally 8+ MB, and in the DOS era, PCs came with 1 MB.