bus topology
termnetworking
A single shared cable that every station taps into, with terminators at each end.
The original Ethernet: 10BASE5 thicknet with vampire taps, then 10BASE2 thinnet with BNC tees. One shared medium means one collision domain, so stations had to take turns, and a single break or a missing terminator took the whole segment down. That fragility is exactly why the star replaced it, though the bus survives conceptually in wireless, where the air is the shared medium.
Also known as: linear bus, backbone topology