Interesting. I don't remember my crossover cables being marked that way; you had to read the dot-matrix printing along the side to know. Color would have been way more handy.
Well I have to add that was interesting too. Because I remember you had to hold the ends up next to each other and compare the order of the colored wires. Same order left-to-right, not cross-over. Anything else, cross-over.
I had quite a few cables with a yellow crimp "jackets" just behind the RJ45.
IIRC they came with DSL modems / routers
I added labels (just a piece of paper under some clear tape) saying "CROSSOVER" at both ends of the cables, so that if I ever plugged a crossover cable into a place where I needed a straight-through, the label would be right there next to the plug.
I seem to recall crossover cables being yellow.
The ones at $dayjob were blue, but we used to tape post-it notes to the ends to make sure we didn't lose them.
Purple cables are faster.
Mine were mixed colours, the cable was grey but the "boot" and connector were black.
I believe a lot of NIC's could autodetect and adapt to the cable? I'm pretty sure I had 2 computers connected to each other using a regular network cable.
Yeah it died out because the hardware advanced and could just switch automatically.
With 1gig Ethernet it became a requirement, the definite end of existence for crossover cables.
Not just a requirement, 1gig ethernet transmit and receive at all of those 4 pairs simultaneously to get the throughput