Minor factoid the article does not mention. ATM is an alternative to Ethernet that's used in many optical fiber environments. The "transfer unit" size of the ATM "cell" is 53 bytes (5 for the header and 48 for the payload). This is much smaller than 1500.

Another quirky story from the past: Sometime around 20 years ago I was having a bizarre networking problem. I could telnet into a host with no trouble, and the interactive session would be going just fine until I did something that produced a large volume of output (such as 'cat' on a large file). At that point the session would freeze and I would eventually get disconnected. After troubleshooting for a while I identified the problem as one of the Ethernet NICs on the client host. It was a premium NIC (3Com 3C509). Nonetheless, the NIC crystal oscillator frequency had drifted sufficiently that it would lose clock synchronization to the incoming frame if the MTU was larger than about 1000.