> It reflected a comment Thacker had made early on, that “coaxial cable is nothing but captive ether,” PARC researcher Alan Kay recalled.

From the article on the origin of the name.

Yes, but ethernet does not does not communicate this in such a way that it communicates that this is a cabled system, nor is there is a matching phrasing for one which doesn't need cables.

The thing is that compared to Token Ring etc., Ethernet really is an "ether" where you just send your packets and hope that there is no collision. But yes.

I think about this every single time I read or hear the word ether. "It means an invisible transfer medium. What were they thinking!?"

They were thinking that they were making a new medium to propagate a signal. Wifi is not a medium but a protocol.

That's Aether.

...So calling wifi Aethernet would be hilarious, but I think we can maybe agree that would not have been a great idea for the sake of actually being able to talk about them out loud.

Tell that to the person who said "trie" should be pronounced "tree"!

Synonyms

So it is, I didn't know that. In that case the other poster point stands, I'm guessing they used the word to indicate the magic of the network?

The name actually makes some sense from the low level system programmer's perspective on the original Ethernet where you flung packets blindly into a single coax cable that snaked around to each workstation.

Ethernet is a protocol, it has nothing to do with the cables. WiFi operates using a slight variant of the Ethernet frame

Ethernet is a family of standards which encompass physical wiring, connectors, electrical/optical signaling standards, and logical layer standards. It absolutely has to do with the cables as well as the signaling.