WRT54G history: the router that accidentally went open source

In a world where our routers look more and more like upside-down spiders than things you would like to have in your living room, there are only a handful of routers that may be considered famous." Steve Jobs' efforts to sell AirPort-most famously by using a hula hoop during a product demo-definitely deserve notice in this category, and the mesh routers made by the Amazon-owned Eero probably fit in this category as well. But a certain Linksys router, despite being nearly 20 years old at this point, takes the cake-and it's all because of a feature that initially went undocumented that proved extremely popular with a specific user base. Today's Tedium talks about the blue-and-black icon of wireless access, the Linksys WRT54G. This is the wireless router that showed the world what a wireless router could do.

I've often pondered tinkering with this, but I'm terrible with anything related to networking - it seems like it's a weird world of technology that exists on its own separate plane, disconnected from everything else. Networking is obtuse, and as long as our home network is functioning, I'm not touching it.