[apelapan]

That Linksys card feels out of place in an over-the-top late 90s build.

As I recall it, the local LAN scene had an almost religious cult around 3com 10mbit ISA cards, that eventually morphed into a similar thing for Intel 100mbit cards.

Drivers and hardware were even more shit back in those days than today. Cards known to have worked in multiple motherboards and across multiple operating systems were held in high regard.

[roskelld]

You've just brought back an old memory there. We used to do LAN parties at the weekend, and none of us has network cards, but one of our friends worked in the IT department of the local university. So he would bring a stack of cards with him and we'd spend hours setting them up and getting each PC on the network, often with great failure if he couldn't bring a batch of same branded cards.

We did learn over time which cards hated connecting with each other, and if he could bag a full batch of 3com we knew we'd likely be in for some early gaming.

[toast0]

A 3rd party NE2000 is a pretty reasonable choice. Certainly, some circles would have a following for specific makers and boards, but the NE2000 was everywhere... There's a reason it's so common in virtual machines; the open design helps too.

[nineteen999]

At the cheap end we relied on NE2000 ISA card clones, we couldn't afford fancy gear like 3com and they worked under Windows/Linux just well enough to play LAN games.