I remember routers being Very Expensive and so realizing you could route 10mb/s with an old Pc and some 3com cards and BSD was a big deal.
Funnily enough that isn’t too far from where Cisco themselves started.
When they started making smallish dedicated routers I remember opening one to see a dodgy backplane and a number of big boards plugged in held up only by minimal slides. The minute it got hot (which it did because no air management) those boards sagged in the middle and it just looked slapdash. The 3Com equivalents were always better built but Cisco had such mindshare it didn’t matter the products were a bit crap
Yep! I remember one of the ISPs I worked for paying like $15K for a Cisco 4500 router with 8 synchronous serial ports and a couple of 10 megabit ethernets. We'd laugh at the sorta bandwidth today. We had a bunch of T1s and a couple of Ascend boxes off of the ethernet.