[zokier]

It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet. Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical, and virtual networks

[AlbertCory]

You left out a step: ThinNet coax, without vampire taps!

That's what was at 3Com when I joined in 1985. I even have a section in The Big Bucks where I took down the entire company for a few seconds by disconnecting the coax. No one noticed.

[xenadu02]

Ethernet is also an example of a tech that has an easy scaling path: hubs with switched uplink ports made it really easy to divide collision domains. In the early days before everything was switched you could instantly reduce collision losses with a little bit of hardware in the server closet with no other changes to the network.

[bombcar]

I remember when hubs were still common; I don't know if any have been made for decades. Even bargain basement switches are switched now, and often even have spanning tree and other 'previously enterprise' features.

[jandrese]

Hubs max out at 100Mbps. Everybody today is using Gigabit, so they're effectively extinct.

Even at 100Mbps hubs were on the way out. They were pretty hacky. The hardware had two different hubs internally and joined them together with a bit of logic, but that logic was somewhat failure prone and it was common to have 10/100 hubs where the 10 clients couldn't talk with the 100 clients and vice versa. Autodetection was at best a roll of the dice so most people wired down their port settings instead. Everybody hated them and switches got cheap real fast so they didn't last very long. The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics.

[EricE]

> The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics.

Indeed - I still have a couple that I used for packet sniffing. Thankfully managed switches or switches smart enough to support port mirroring are inexpensive and thus fairly ubiquitous now.