Hard to beat (at the time, late 80s) for small offices with a handful of Macs and a couple of printers, though. More of a problem for offices which included IBM machines.

I wonder how much thought Apple gave to Ethernet and TCP/IP after seeing it at Xerox PARC and Brown University. Apparently AppleTalk was instead derived from Cambridge Ring. I suspect LocalTalk was mainly about getting networking on the cheap. Using the RS244 interface for networking was pretty ingenious in a time when hardware was expensive. Does anyone know if the Big Mac was going to have built-in Ethernet?