Roy J. Tellason said in a message to Lawrence Garvin:
 LG> opt immediately for a 3Com Etherlink III card at $79 (or less), 
 LG> to insure best performance.
 RJT> It's nice to see that those boards are so well-liked out there, 
 RJT> as that's what I happened to acquire here. 
 RJT> I've got five of those 3Com cards,  and maybe one or two others of
 RJT> unknown quality by comparison.  Is there that much difference
 RJT> between them? 
As far as I'm concerned, there is. The Etherlink III has the special 
enhancement called "Parallel Tasking" -- essentially what it does is off load 
a lot of "Ethernet protocol" routines from the stack and incorporate them on 
a hardware ASIC. End result is significantly less CPU load to manage the 
network traffic, and thus better network throughput in general.
The Etherlink III cards have consistently been rated better on performance 
than any other 16-bit NIC since their first appearance.
 RJT> And what are you going to do with those old cards?  :-)
From a guy who already has more 3Coms than I do? :)
Don't know yet, Roy. I'm trying to keep this SOHO network down to a 
manageable size, but boy it sure wants to grow. Sad part is that I've already 
got a 486DX2/66 chip, a 486DX/33 chip, a 386DX/40 systemboard, a 386DX/20 
systemboard, and a couple of 286 systemboards -- not to mention the Tandy 
1000HX I acquired (which I don't know why or what for yet).
Every one of 'em is dying to get juiced back up and put on the network "just 
because I can". In the meantime, I'm giving serious though to upgrading my 
two remaining 486 systems to 5x86/133 (found a local source at $50/board 
w/chip), which would give me two more 486 systemboards. 
What I really need is to acquire some slimline desktop chassis, like the old 
Compaq Deskpro, or the more recent Prolinea, and stack them up and make them 
dedicated nodes on the Fido system, and then use my minitowers, etc. as 
servers and personal workstations.
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