Modern ethernet supports Auto MDI-X, which manages that automagically for you.
To be fair, I don't know why USB had to wait until a few years back to stop acting quantum with its C incarnation. As you know a USB interface with two possible orientations will require at least three insertion attempts.
I grew up with RS232 and expected better. I had to wait quite a long time. USB C is quite good.
Old 10base-T ethernet used one pair of wires for transmit, and another pair of wires for receive (and the other 2 pairs? they did nothing at all!). This worked for the usual case of plugging computers into a hub.
It was Good Enough, and it fit the style of the time.
Could it have been done better? Sure! But that would have added complexity, and adding complexity means even more cost.
And all of this Ethernet hardware was already very expensive. A person who had enough money get into 10base-T hardware probably also had enough money to get a crossover cable in their hands.
The expense is why people like you and I grew up with using RS-232: That was the affordable way to get computers to talk together.
(Let me guess: You also had a run-in with 10base2 once that became cheap-enough, and you also spent way too long soldering together a cable to get PLIP going between a pair of computers)
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Anyway, auto MDI/MDI-X is pretty much a solved problem these days. At this point there are surely people reading these pages who have been doing stuff with computers and Ethernet for their entire lives and have never needed to know what a crossover cable is.
This, too, is Good Enough. :)
There's also other ways.
Like USB tethering. Plug the computer into the Android phone with a regular USB cable that is already kicking around. No ethernet adapter required; the phone behaves as a network adapter in and of itself. The computer keeps the phone charged. This worked at least as far back as the OG Motorola Droid, in 2009. (Drivers may be a fun thing to get working depending on the OS, but that's just a software problem.)
Or: Other hardware that is already laying around. The old home network router that has been hosting generations of spiders for over a decade, in a dusty cardboard box at the back of a closet next to the favorite pair of shoes that are simply too nice to ever get worn? There's a good chance that it's hackable and able to run custom firmware. Stuff a period-correct copy of OpenWRT or DD-WRT or Tomato or [something] into it, and turn it into a wifi client bridge so your old Ethernet stuff can chat on the wifi network. (I've had the big, color HP laser printer at the shop connected this way with a hacked Linksys WRT54G for very nearly two decades so far. Part of me says I should upgrade that box one of these years, but it still works fine and I find this amusing.)
Or: Rube Goldberg minimalism. The Raspberry Pi Zero W that is in the drawer next to the extra key for the Ford that got sold a decade ago (and the spiders; there's always spiders): It runs Linux just fine. It talks wifi. It can talk RNDIS to a USB-connected Windows computer. It can therefore become a wifi-to-usb bridge, wherein the computer doesn't even know that it's talking to a wifi network. Drivers for this are built-ins as far back as XP and are downloadable for windows 9x. (The PC provides the power for the Zero W over the same cable that the data flows over.)
There's lots of ways that many/most of us computer-types can get this done without spending a dime, or ever waiting for a delivery. :)
Android USB tethering uses the RNDIS standard, which I believe goes back to the Windows 95 era, so there's certainly no shortage of driver support.
Pre-made wireless bridges generally have web interfaces (and/or dreadful phone apps) to get them set up and chatting the right way.
It's a process that's very similar to that of configuring a home network router, except the bridge works in the opposite direction.
In this way, the devices with ethernet jacks have no idea what things like WEP, WPA, or wifi even are. And that's kind of the whole point. :)
These devices have the wifi/ethernet bridge functionality being discussed, (as well as a bunch of other stuff) and are OpenWRT based. Built in openvpn/wireguard as well. We bought a bunch for our team way back when (IIRC they were < $20 USD then) Gl.iNet has other similar more powerful devices as your use case may need.
The issue you're describing would only be relevant is we used a USB (or other connection type) Wifi adapter.
I wonder what LLMs would suggest as the first option to accomplish that...
I would say since it has mpci it’s easy enough to patch the bios and run a newer WiFi chip inside so you’re not locked into this but this is a great workout for older pcs.
Alternatively, many usb WiFi dongles do have windows xp support but yeah with the new standards def something else. It’s a cool workaround!
