Ethernet Color Code

Ethernet A & B
Chris Boden

Didn't catch what he was trying to say the first time so I restarted it. There are eight wires in an ethernet cable but only four of them get used and half of those are grounds. I think. In any case I only use four and it seems to work fine. There's probably a good reason for all the extra wires, but I just learned enough to get my computers hooked up and working. The reason I'm posting this is because of this comment from Reman1975:

I worked in IT for over 20 years, and the coolest thing about IT standards for me is how you can buy a motherboard from China, a graphics card that was made in America, Memory sticks that came from a factory in Japan, a CPU that was fabricated in Malaysia, and a SSD that started out in Korean, chuck it all together like Lego bricks, slap some OS install media in it that was based on work by a guy in Finland, and dispite these manufacturers/programmers never being in contact with each other, or even speaking in a common language, folks STILL manage to be surprised if everything doesn't just work straight from the first boot up.

This situations only possible because there's many hundreds of standards that cover every aspect of every single component that goes into a PC. These standards have been refined over decades to get to the point where it's not totally inconceivable that you could talk a non tech savy person through building a PC from a kit of parts OVER THE PHONE, and still have better than even odds of the finished result working as expected.

This remarkable situation is something that's never lost that sense of amazement for me.