For quite a while after Windows already became popular, any program that did networking on IBM PCs still had to be an MS-DOS program.
In 1993, (regular, consumer) Windows didn't really "support" networking; (limited) OS support for networking was something only available in Windows For Workgroups, which itself was something you'd only expect to find installed in offices, not on the kind of home PC owned by someone dialing into a MUD.
I believe that you could run these networked programs in a Windows 3.1 OS DOS virtual machine, so you didn't have to reboot fully into DOS just to run them.
But it makes sense, from the perspective of an author of networked software at the time, to think of IBM PCs as being "MS DOS machines." That's the abstraction the developer had to work against for that port of the software.
In 1993, (regular, consumer) Windows didn't really "support" networking; (limited) OS support for networking was something only available in Windows For Workgroups, which itself was something you'd only expect to find installed in offices, not on the kind of home PC owned by someone dialing into a MUD.
I believe that you could run these networked programs in a Windows 3.1 OS DOS virtual machine, so you didn't have to reboot fully into DOS just to run them.
But it makes sense, from the perspective of an author of networked software at the time, to think of IBM PCs as being "MS DOS machines." That's the abstraction the developer had to work against for that port of the software.