I have a love/hate relationship with the Xircom adapter. It's portable and great for machines without ISA slots, but the max throughput is about 40KB/sec. A nice, real ISA card like a WD8003 can do over 100KB/sec on the same machine.
Hmm, I now have memories of both a parallel Xircom adapter, and just a null-modem connection with SLIP and PPP (pretty sure I used both). The Xircom adapter might have come after. Though with that, you'd get at most around 10kB/s (at 115200 baud), and that's assuming the 286 has a 16550A to begin with...
