Well, you have a very different memory of the era than I do. I never had any problem getting an ethernet card working on Linux: there was never any work to do!

Well, you have a very different memory of the era than I do. I never had any problem getting an ethernet card working on Linux: there was never any work to do! They just worked out of the box. I believe it was almost entirely due to the work of Donald Becker. I don't know anything about the guy, other than he had a NASA email address, but I kept seeing his name mentioned when looking for anything network card related. I remember the floppy disk pain though. Few machines had CD-ROMs so basically it was copying 30 images overwriting Microsoft Windows & Office floppy disks (they were better quality than the cheap 3.5" disks you generally got supplied with and there were always spare ones) and then swap, swap, swap...