,
12 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
thinking about the netgear FS102, which is exactly nothing more than it appears, a switch with two ports 
this exists to serve exactly one purpose and its one that hasn't made sense since about 1999. it'd be very hard to reverse engineer its purpose if you weren't aware of the circumstances of the early ethernet era
say it's 1997 and you have a business office with 14 computers. you buy a 16 port ethernet hub - *not* switch - to connect everything. your services are a file server, print server, and maybe one or two internet services at no more than 1.5 megabits
Now you decide to add eight more computers, and maybe another file server, and you start to realize that things are getting uncomfortably cramped on your non-switched network. ethernet hubs, see, are little more than electrical amplifiers.
for the first twenty-odd years of Ethernet almost all networks were unswitched. sending a port to any port on a hub would send it to all ports. if two computers transmitted at the same time, the entire network stopped working for a moment due to the resulting "collision"
sixteen computers on one hub is pretty rough, but maybe doable if all you ever do is occasionally get some 13-24 kilobyte .DOCs off of a file server, send a print job a few dozen times a day and access a text-only internet data service
but at the point where you have 18, 19, 20 computers, things are probably pretty unbearable. at any given moment anyone on the network is likely to be transmitting *something* so total throughput is likely to drop to virtually nothing
Ethernet *switches* are completely different beasts. They look at every packet that enters a port, figure out where the destination is, and send the packet only to *that* port. They don't have collisions, but in the mid-late 90s they were still quite expensive.
So, you have your 22 PCs. Put half on one hub, put half on a second hub. Connect the two hubs through a two-port switch. Now you've effectively turned your 22 PC unswitched network into a pair of 11-PC unswitched networks, buying you time
Machines can still communicate across the switch, but only when they need to, and the rest of the time their collision domain only includes the machines on the same physical hub.
Replacing 32 ports worth of hubs (that you already owned) with switches would have cost $2000 (see below), but you could buy a single $159 two-port switch and get instant relief to tide you over for a couple years until prices dropped.
The advertisement makes this clear - the purpose of this product was to split up your hubbed network, because replacing hubs port-for-port was totally unreasonable costwise for SMBs
