Around that time (1996) I worked a lot with ATM. We had Cisco routers and switches and Fore switches that were doing something called "LAN Emulation" (LANE, <a href="https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/tech/asynchronous-transfer-mode-atm/lan-emulation-lane/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/tech/asynchronous-transfer-mod...</a>) on ATM (with a 622 Mbit/s backbone, no less).<p>It was bleeding edge technology and kind of a nightmare because randomly the management plane would lose the mappings from IP to ATM and the "LAN" randomly stopped working (here's a troubleshooting guide, though :-) <a href="https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/internetworking/troubleshooting/guide/tr1921.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/internetworking/troubleshoo...</a>) . We also did some wide-area networking with ATM that worked by manually setting up ATM PVCs with some telco guys throughout Europe.<p>Back then there was also quite a bit of activity for using ATM with Linux, led by Werner Almesberger (who also developed the LILO bootloader): <a href="https://www.almesberger.net/cv/papers/atm_3rd.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.almesberger.net/cv/papers/atm_3rd.pdf</a>