The movement of the dangling wire is proportional to the number of packets on the network. That is, the more traffic on the local area network, the higher the frequency of the "wiggles." The transceiver plugs into the network, and the dynamic behavior of the wire become an intuitive peripheral representation of the network activity. In contrast to a screen based graph of ethernet activity this device is a shared social display of information.

1995 Ethernet transceiver;
local area network;
10baseT;
peripheral display;
thanks to: Ed Richley and Lawrence Butcher

exhibited at Xerox PARC 95-99; Exploratorium 96- ; Siggraph '95; Postmasters '99; and others