At a company I worked at we looked at Ethernet at the time, and it simply was way too pricey compared to AppleTalk at the time. Phone wire was cheap, and the office spaces we had were already wired up for two phone jacks, so it simply was a matter of isolating the punch down blocks for which jacks to use. (Luckily the folks who wired up the spaces put all the even numbered jacks on the same blocks, odds on the others... ) For the cost of one ethernet card (for the one machine we had that actually could take one) we wired up two offices, probably a couple hundred machines. (Mostly Mac's of course... but ultimately a few Caymen Gator boxes to bridge to the small ethernet segments that supported our Sun boxes...which had ethernet built in..) It was chatty, protocol wise, but a very cost effective way to network things at the time... I've actually got a NEW in the box Farallon PhoneNet (which was yet another name for it..) Star Controller sitting here. (I tried to sell it on EBay recently but apparently nobody has any of these networks that I can find. ) It's about to go into the recycler pile... (if someone is interested, drop me a line...) Earl