What made them great was the driver support they came with for all other systems.

Which one wouldn't care for under Linux, because that brought its own driver, written by Donald Becker.

There were also fakes on the market, making you wonder wtf was wrong with your setup?

Nothing, just the faked card!

Much more bang for the buck could be had with anything from what's listed here:

https://ftp.sun.ac.za/ftp/pub/documentation/network/tulip.ht... or more general here:

https://ftp.sun.ac.za/ftp/pub/documentation/network/index.ht...

which is a mirror of the former https://web.archive.org/web/20031202023237/http://www.scyld.... long gone.

Similar things applied to SCSI-controllers. Adaptec? Why? NCR/Symbios Logic? Yay!

> ...the hard part was configuring xorg.conf (xfree86.conf? I don't remember) with the appropriate CRT geometry so you didn't kill your monitor.

Not really.

First - 'Multisync' screens were already a thing.

Second - One could cheat by using tables with detailed VESA timings, so it was more or less cut and paste, IF you knew what to paste where, and why :)

Twoandahalf - There were various tools which would calculate all that shit for you, which later on converged into Xorg, like

https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.7/doc/man/man1/cvt.1.xhtml and

https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.7/doc/man/man1/gtf.1.xhtml

Third - One could cheat even more by using Suse Linux YAST, which also did that for you. (I knew people who did a minimal install for just using that part, copying the config, and applying that to whatever they really used. Couldn't really understand that, though.)

Knowledge of that came in handy, when I once got a giant 21" CRT, which would show the BIOS and following text modes fine, only to go blank with 'out of sync' if you tried anything graphical. WTF?

Turns out that thing implemented just all sorts of BIOS/textmode for compatibility reasons, and wanted to have 1600x1200 with anything from 70 to 80Hz, and nothing less.

Which meant if you wanted 800x600 for whichever reason on that thing, you had to deliver that with 144Hz, or something. 1024x768, 1280x1024, were sligthly more 'relaxed', just 110 to 120Hz, IIRC.

Which could be fun if your week VGA couldn't deliver that, or if you were a Gamer, and played games which overrode whatever has been setup by tools like SciTech Display Doctor, which is how I got it for scrap :)