Ethernet hardware now has auto-crossover. However, that hasn't always been the case. There was a good decade in the 90's where you needed a special cable wiring if you wanted to connect two computers vs a computer to a switch.
I once used a crossover cable with an old 3Com card and a Linksys switch - whatever it sent down the wires, the Ethernet port on that switch was fried and has never done Tx or Rx since. I bandaged it with electric tape so I don't connect something else, and also in hope it will someday heal.
The 3Com card was unscathed. In fact, it is probably feeling stronger after that exertion.
Now I know I'm old because I just assumed that's how it still was. I'd be like the weird old grandpa at a party talking about a choke or carburetor or a hand crank on a car while all the kids just stare blankly.
Easily going into the early 2000s. I remember trying to setup LAN parties in 2004/2005, where the wrong combination of patch or normal cable with hub/switch/PC made everything a nightmare.
I found a few patch cables mixed in with regular cables. one day, i got so tired of messing with them, i cut the cables and put them in the trash. i could have just trashed, them, but that didn't feel right. i mean, what if someone were to go dumpster diving. the curse would then be on them.
Whenever I have a bum cable and confirm it’s the cable, it gets destroyed. Too many cables have failed to get into the trash or have somehow crawled back out for me to do anything else.
Uh? They're trivial to tell apart, just put the RJ45 jacks side by side and look at the colors of the wires going in?
Same sequence -> Straight ethernet cable
Same sequence except for 1 swapped pair -> Probably a crossover Ethernet cable
Inverted sequence -> ISDN cable, burn it.
Also (apart from the ISDN cables) - it hasn't mattered for close to quarter of a century, all switches and NICs are auto-MDI-X nowadays, why throw away the stuff.
I've certainly more than once outright thrown out items for just falling outside of the return window rather than hand-me-downing them to friends for being so crappy that I didn't want to ever operate them ever again in any context.
The one I remember the most was a Bluetooth speaker that yapped your ear off for a half-minute combined with an obscene amount of jingle beeping at 100% blast and more LEDs than a Christmas tree as a power-on/off procedure back when they were novel items.
Random anecdote: I worked at a company with an on-prem server room and the building got struck by lightning. It fried some servers and quite a few nic cards on employee computers. Our CTO decided since we'd be in the building doing hardware replacements anyway, now was the time to redo our wiring closest as well.
That was my introduction to wiring up CAT-5 cables and rj45 connectors and, with so many to make, I needed a way to remember the wiring diagram without having to read it over and over or use a visual reference. The mnemonic rhythm I used to remember the pattern was "orange/white, orange... green/white, blue... blue/white, green... brown/white, brown". Of course, said out loud, you couldn't tell if it was "orange/white, orange" or "orange, white/orange" and I kept confusing the rest of the team when I'd say it, but it worked for me.
This was circa 2005/2006 and I still say it like that. It just stuck.
