So, not quite an upgrade, but I’m very pleased from a nostalgia perspective nonetheless.
I found this beast in a cupboard at work a few months back, but missing its power pack. A few orders from aliexpress later, I finally found a USB (it’s 5v 2A, which is very handy) power cable that fits, and as you can see it still works. I very slowly downloaded a load of updates using it earlier.
The 4 port version of this hub was the very first piece of networking equipment that I ever bought when I was at university, all the way back in 1999. It let my housemates and I play networked Doom, which was pretty cool back then.
Hubs these days are practically useless, except that you can use them for network taps. Not that 10M is going to let you capture much traffic!
This will now live on a shelf somewhere and make me smile whenever I spot it.
My first ever switch was a 16 port unmanaged Netgear one.... it lives on as the unmanaged part of my hub in my 'office'.... I remember being so happy watching all the blinking lights when I first wired everything into it (had been daisy chaining old broadband routers with DHCP turned off before that).... seems like a long time ago lol.
Grats on the nostalgia