[hamiltonkibbe]

For the most part the MAC just looks for another signal on the wire (another train on the same section of rail) and when it looks clear, starts transmitting (driving). As you can imagine, there will be cases when 2 MACs start talking at the same time, at which point they detect the collision, wait a random delay and try again. I wouldn’t want to be on that train, I’d prefer plain old serial with hardware flow control

[fanf2]

Ethernet has not worked like that since the 1990s.

Even WiFi avoids relying on collision detection by routing client-to-client traffic via the AP instead of being peer-to-peer.