drhowarddrfine - 3:14 pm on Dec 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

they used a unix based network

All ethernet networks in general are based on Unix.

I latter tried multiboot linux for maybe 6 month on free distrib of linux, and it was . 6 months of hours spent figuring how to make either the printer or the modem work after

Depends on the printer and modem, not Linux. The first time I tried Linux was in 2004 and those things worked right out of the box.