To be a professional network engineer, you need to know the differences between internet-working devices, such as repeaters, hubs, bridges, switches, and routers.
In the dawn of networks, we used a topology called a bus, which was simply one main cable, usually a coaxial cable, that every other node was connected to using vampire taps, and the PCs used NIC cards that had BNC connectors.
These networks served their purpose at the time when bus topologies and coaxial cable were used for networking, but it was extremely slow, and if there was a break in any part of the cable, the entire network would be down. That means no one could send or receive any information. Why? Because the broken part of the cable would send signals back onto the network called reflection, and all computers would hear noise on the network and not transmit.
But it did not have to...
