> If you're growing onions in the backyard, you don't need a router. If you're writing emails, you're gonna need to send them through a router or two before someone reads
That’s what the cable company wants you to believe. We sent their damned boxes back. They wanted us renting a modem that never hangs up, then buying a router just so our own computers could talk to each other. Mine used to call yours directly over the telephone!
Now there’s a computer inside the modem, another pretending to be a router, and a mess of switches, gateways, and subnet masks to do what two modems and a telephone number used to accomplish.
They took the party line, put it on a television channel, called it broadband, and convinced everybody to rent the equipment.
In my day, when somebody tried to break into your computer, you could hear the bastard dialing. And when you were done with the Internet, you hung up. Now they want you connected twenty-four hours a day.
Just wait until somebody breaks into your television through that cable. You’ll wish you’d kept your rabbit ears.
I for one find it simpler and better to have a single router for multiple computers to talk among themselves, rather than daisy chaining serial ports (or how did you accomplish that back in the day ie before Ethernet?)
> I for one find it simpler and better to have a single router for multiple computers to talk among themselves
That's not what a router does. A router provides communication between two (or, theoretically, more) different networks.
Multiple computers talking among themselves would generally all be on the same network. (Or, if they're not, you'd put a whole mesh of redundant routers between them.)
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