I remember an early plan to use an 4,77 MHz 8088 PC with 8-bit ISA bus to route IP packets between an Amiga 500 and "the internet" which in that case would been 10 Mbit/s Ethernet (10Base-T). On the Amiga side parallell port was the intended connection.
The rationale was that Ethernet cards for the Amiga was rare and definitely expensive at the time. While PC ones were at least 4x cheaper. The PC would had to set the Ethernet MAC destination and examine the IP packet source and destination at minimum. I assume this would been done in assembler.
But I have wondered what kind of performance such a PC would been able to put up in terms of packets per second and kByte/s ..??
