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George R. R. Martin writes used to write on an original DOS PC with a monochromatic display. I guess now he uses Wordstar 4.0 on a DOS emulator due to his 30+ year old museum piece failing on him.

If you read George R. R. Martin's blog or follow him at all, you'll see he is an easily distracted individual. Football, side projects, and all number of other things keeps him from writing, so he has devised a way to focus on his writing while eliminating these distractions. He sits in his personal library in front of a(n) ancient relatively modern PC running Dosbox, but like his old retro machine he's not connected to the Internet. He doesn't have his phone with him. He can't check scores to see if the Giants are winning and he can't binge Netflix or listen to Pandora. It's just him, and the keyboard.

You can put DOSBox on your regular modern PC and see if that works out for you, if you can resist the temptation to Alt-Tab over to Reddit. You can get DOSBox for your phone if you feel so inclined and run it there. Some newer Samsung devices even have a Desktop kind of mode where you hook it up to a monitor and turn it into a desktop kind of experience. You can get yourself a Raspberry Pi computer kit, install RetroPie and build a tiny DOS emulator workstation this way with a spare monitor and USB keyboard, preferably away from other distracting influences in your life.

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Alternatively, if you're a little crazy (Like some of us here.) you can go scour the thrift stores, Ebay, yard sales, attic, and dumpsters in search of original hardware, and build yourself an entire pre-Internet 1980s style DOS workstation. Of course then if you are in search of distraction free writing you'll have to avoid the temptation to just play a bunch of Commander Keen on it.

Hi, if not a PCI slot, maybe ISA? If you really want to gwt this working you might unplug the sound card (however, being this old, maybe it only comes with an Internal speaker?)

For ISA devices there's:

-NE2000

• 3COM 3C503
  
  Once you managed to get an Ethernet Card working, than the Job is done. At this point if you had a raspberry you would use it as Wifi to Ethernet Bridge adapter or simply buy a Bridge Adapter like this. In this way you'd be able to fast-connect to any wfi network with DOS (I do so)
  
  Otherwise you can Remote-Band connect to your telephone line using a RJ-11 port, through a dial-up modem
  
  You will need a dial-up ISP account, an analogue phone, a dial-up Modem and a RJ-11 cable...all oh which are not so obvious these days(.....this reminds of my childhood spent hacking with a 28 Kb/s connection)
  
  If you got everything, then you'll may want to give a look to this page to start understanding how to dial-up connection works in MS-DOS
  
  
  If no one of these is viable/bearable, then there's Spider_Gilgamesh' solution, using a USB to Serial adapter and configuring again Rpi to act as modem. I think it's theoretically correct don't see why it shouldn't work, so why do not you ask him whether he's put that solution in practice for real or not? and maybe ask for a walkthrough ;)

Honestly the cheapest and easiest way to transfer small files is to just get a USB 3.5" floppy drive and some blank disks. They're both still fairly inexpensive.

More expensive and complicated would be to find a couple old Zip drives (Zip was the brand name, they have nothing to do with .zip archives) that still work and transfer files with 100mb Zip disks. You'd need a parallel port model for your DOS laptop and a USB model for your modern machine, but once set up it should work for transferring larger files and programs.

Option 3 is cheap but might be complicated depending on how easy your laptop's hard drive is to get to: replace the hard drive with a 2.5" IDE to SD card adapter. You could just copy whatever you want to it on a modern machine then move it to the laptop.