In article <201004071023.o37ANtww018405@aurora.sol.net>, Joe Greco
<jgreco@ns.sol.net> writes>>interoperability and backwards compatibility were the tipping points.
>
>Ah, yes, backwards compatibility: implementing the fantastic feature of
>breaking the network...By "backwards compatibility" I mean the ability to use the new LAN from
a laptop that didn't have an Ethernet connection built in, and didn't
have an optional [proprietary] internal Ethernet card available either.
There are a lot of things to target with the term, I was picking
conveniently. 
>we all remember the fun of what happened when
>someone incorrectly unhooked a 10base2 network segment; D-Link managed
>to one-up that on the theoretically more-robust 10baseT/UTP by
>introducing a card that'd break your network when you powered off the
>attached PC.That tale of woe doesn't really sound like it's the fault of backwards
compatibility.
No, but I remember network people talking gleefully about the benefits of
10baseT (and come on - it has lots), and how it fixed the "someone needed
to move a PC and disconnected the cables from the T rather than the T
from the NIC" problem... and along came D-Link (and some other vendors
I think) with the brilliant idea of a host-integrated hub.
Now, remember, some network guys walked around with new-in-bag BNC T's in
their pocket because they'd run across someone who disappeared a T every
month or two, and there's great power in turning your back, twiddling for
a few seconds, and then being able to holler "Network's back up!"...
Unfortunately, power-cycling crashed PC's is (was?) pretty common, and
many users are (were?) also trained to shut off PC's when done, so here
you've introduced something that is by-design going to fail periodically.
Not just if-and-when someone decides to move a computer and screws it up.
Of course, if someone actually removes the PC in question, and does not
realize that the network actually feeds _through_ the PC, um, well, you
cannot just whip a T out of your pocket to "fix" the network.
To me, this is a Dilbert-class engineering failure. I would imagine that
if you could implement a hub on the network card, the same chip(s) would
work in an external tin can with a separate power supply. Designing a
product that actually exhibits a worse failure mode than 10base2 is ...
strange to me.
I was sarcastically referring to this as "backwards compatibility",
possibly also with New Enhanced Features, ha ha.
Didn't the operational status of the LAX immigration
department fall to zero for almost a whole day, once; as a result of a
rogue network card crashing the LAN?
Probably. Not my area of the country. There are plenty of examples of
networking disasters. 
... JG