There was a time when the cabling that connected the computer to its peripherals was considered part of the computer system. Seasoned industry veterans (aka “old people”) remember when there were cable products specifically associated with hardware OEMs-the Wang dual coax and the RG58 DEC Cable are examples. If a company was buying or using one of these vendors’ products, the matching cables also had to be used. Therefore, whoever was responsible for managing the hardware was also responsible for the cabling used to connect the devices together. This also (not coincidentally) made it difficult for the customer to move from one vendor to another.

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