Hacker News Reader

Comment by soundworlds | Hacker News Reader

That wasn't that long ago was it..?

/looks longingly out the window, and catch my aging face in the reflection

Yup ... still have some old 'xover' cables lying around - all of which are RED in colour to explicitly declare their usage

Interesting. I don't remember my crossover cables being marked that way; you had to read the dot-matrix printing along the side to know. Color would have been way more handy.

I added labels (just a piece of paper under some clear tape) saying "CROSSOVER" at both ends of the cables, so that if I ever plugged a crossover cable into a place where I needed a straight-through, the label would be right there next to the plug.

Well I have to add that was interesting too. Because I remember you had to hold the ends up next to each other and compare the order of the colored wires. Same order left-to-right, not cross-over. Anything else, cross-over.

I had quite a few cables with a yellow crimp "jackets" just behind the RJ45. IIRC they came with DSL modems / routers

I seem to recall crossover cables being yellow.

The ones at $dayjob were blue, but we used to tape post-it notes to the ends to make sure we didn't lose them.

Mine were mixed colours, the cable was grey but the "boot" and connector were black.

Purple cables are faster.

I believe a lot of NIC's could autodetect and adapt to the cable? I'm pretty sure I had 2 computers connected to each other using a regular network cable.

Yeah it died out because the hardware advanced and could just switch automatically.

With 1gig Ethernet it became a requirement, the definite end of existence for crossover cables.

Not just a requirement, 1gig ethernet transmit and receive at all of those 4 pairs simultaneously to get the throughput

> That wasn't that long ago was it..?

Last time I used a crossover cable I was still using dialup, probably about 20 years ago. Once I had DSL I also had a router, so the crossover cable became redundant.

I still have a null modem adapter somewhere, and a null modem cable (and they were REAL not the "fake" ones).

I have been struggling to get serial comms going with a TESmart KVM because the ethernet interface is stupid and I lost comms after a misconfiguration and there is no way to factory reset the device. That was not going any better and I ended up purchasing a null modem adapter (at an eye-wateringly high price) because of course I threw away a drawer full of serial adapters a decade ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com