I still have a box with about a dozen of those around here somewhere; They were still useful even well into the era of on-motherboard ethernet because installing the operating system over the LAN was a lot less of a hassle than swapping CDs around and finding out that the drive or the media went flaky etc. Network boot support for the on-motherboard devices was frequently crap or just plain missing, but the 3c905 could slot a proper boot ROM. The last revs of the board even came with said boot ROM right from the factory.

I have a vague memory that there was one particular revision that had some kind of flaw which made it undesirable; It would drop DMAs or interrupts or something like that. The A revision maybe? I'll probably remember at some particularly annoying time.

3c509

and DEC Tulip!