August 3, 2026 — When ethernet was first designed in the 1970s, the first cables to use it were all yellow, for two primary reasons. The first was that one of ethernet specification's creators, Rich Seifert, really liked yellow. "It's my favorite color. I drove a yellow car, I have yellow furniture," Seifert said in a presentation at this year's Vintage Computer Festival titled History of Ethernet: Musings of an Early Networker. Specifically, ethernet was "1968 Corvette yellow." The second reason Seifert pushed for ethernet cables to all be this specific shade of yellow was more practical than aesthetic. While today ethernet is typically run over small twisted pair cables, it initially used a much bulkier coaxial cable that had to be physically connected using a vampire tap that physically "bit into" the metal cable, through its rubber shielding, to make contact. Ethernet's creators were worried about what might happen if you used one of those vampire taps on the wrong cable by mis...