I first used PhoneNet in a small school computer lab. For the time it was awesome. A bunch of Macs could pretty easily share files and print to the shared print

I first used PhoneNet in a small school computer lab. For the time it was awesome. A bunch of Macs could pretty easily share files and print to the shared printers. A point to remember is the machines weren't sharing terabytes, gigabytes, or even necessarily megabytes of files. Text or Word docs, spreadsheets, and occasionally networked games were a majority of the traffic. Rarely was the speed ever an issue. You just had to learn some behaviors like don't open and edit a file directly from a network share and everything would slow down when sending a job to the printer. An aspect I thought was cool was it worked with cheap adapters on all the Macs in the lab from the old Performas to the latest PowerMacs. Ethernet cards were still fairly expensive as was cabling. A cheap RJ-11 extension cord from RadioShack could add a new drop to the PhoneNet network. Once Ethernet got cheap it was far and away superior to LocalTalk/PhoneNet networking. There was no going back once you tried Ethernet but for a time LocalTalk was an amazing Mac feature.