This laptop had (and has) Puppy Linux on one partition, and wireless internet does work there.
I installed jessie 8.7.1 on a new partition. During the install process, which was done from a USB stick with CD1 only, the software reported "network configuation failed..." so I skipped that step, and everything worked out fine. The machine can boot into either Puppy or Debian. But no wireless under Debian.
So, I hooked it up to wired internet, and that does (or did) work. Before installing anything, I did have to uncomment a few lines in /etc/apt/sources.list because (I think) these sites were commented out during the install process because it couldn't get online. I then followed the directions at
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https://wiki.debian.org/wl
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deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
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apt-get update
apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') broadcom-sta-dkms
modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb brcmsmac bcma
modprobe wl
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lo no wireless extensions
This is a fresh install. The only other thing I've done is install firefox-esr.
I have some experience as a linux user, mostly working as a programmer where someone else takes care of the sysadmin stuff, but this is the first machine I've ever tried to install linux on myself.