Networking the laptop to play games with a null modem cable!

now that I knew computers could talk to each other I started to find things everywhere, a few years had passed and doom was out. there was now a computer shop in my town, and I had failed at upgrading the laptop to win95 as the very last floppy out of a set of 100 ish was corrupt. but it didn’t matter. you didn’t need windows to run doom. or heretic. which was (and is) much better imho.
i had had a ram upgrade on the laptop, it now had 16mb ram. my friend had a PC too, and his had sound! and colour! (this was how I found out that dos 6.22 had colour in it!) we put our money together and got a null modem cable (after trying to get our modems to talk to each other and failing) and I brought the laptop round. we setup the connection and spent weeks playing multiplayer doom, heretic and [some car racing game – like a clone of mario kart ???] I also got a boot sector virus. (not from the null-modem connection, but from a shareware game we got to play on our network).