I believe what he mentioned was running "winipcfg". There is no "winipconfig"
As far as the history, IPCONFIG has been around for quite a while.
With Win95, Win98 and ME, in addition there is a GUI interface for looking at the IP information called WINIPCFG.
Windows2000 and XP do not have it built in, but there is a version you can download which was posted earlier.
If you install it into the same directory as the OS, then you can run "wntipcfg" without needing to enter the path.