Wow, that brings back memories. In 1995, I sat right next to one of the guys who invented what we called “Magic Packet” inside AMD and what became known as Wake

Wow, that brings back memories. In 1995, I sat right next to one of the guys who invented what we called “Magic Packet” inside AMD and what became known as Wake On LAN. I was working on what later became WiFi. Those were fun times; lots of innovation in the networking space. We worked with HP and Microsoft on this since it needed OS support from Windows, too. Yea, it’s not sophisticated at all since the hardware needed to decode it before generating an interrupt and passing anything to the driver. It just needed to be something statistically unlikely to occur in a real network to avoid false positives. And it needs to be unique per NIC, because you don’t want a single packet waking up every machine. So, it just repeats the MAC address a few times. The original use case was for doing things like network backups late at night. The file server needed a way to wake up a machine that had gone to sleep. Almost everything in the computer can be asleep excelpt for the NIC and whatever power-on circuitry is necessary to power everything back up and resume. In other words, it can be a deep sleep.