[bsder]

It also didn't help that these cards often had weird hardware failures (maybe because clone?) that would make them flaky but people would keep them in service because Ethernet cards were still relatively expensive at the time and, as you point out, network protocols are pretty resilient.

I used to have to literally break flaky cards in half--not kidding. Three different people fished a card out of my trash and only stopped when they realized I physically broke it--and this was about 2001-ish.