The original ethernet cable was canonically '1968 Corvette yellow' to distinguish it from a power cable—because you literally had to drill into it to install it

I've owned an awful lot of ethernet cables in my life, in all sorts of colors. Black, blue, white, grey, yellow, green… even brown and red, I'm pretty sure. If you asked me what's the most common ethernet cable color outside black and white, I'd probably go with blue—but this weekend I learned that 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. During the presentation he held up an original ethernet cable, clipped off a spool still in storage at his house, to demonstrate how bright it was back in the early 1980s when the technology was first rolling out. Specifically, ethernet was "1968 Corvette yellow," a tone I've learned car dudes refer to as "Safari yellow" to distinguish it from the other Corvette shades of the '60s and '7...