The article mentions fiber becoming more common in the rack and I'd agree....as iv seen its popularity grow in the homelab space.

As a broke college student, I have lots of experience with Cisco networking equipment and have taken quite a few classes for networking. I'm trying to get my hands on a free/ultra cheap high end Cisco device that can do some more modern feature set like ROCM and other newer technologies. It also would let me upgrade my local network from 10 gig, but the main goal would be to get hands on experience with 400 and 800 gig equipment.

Linear here means just an analog amplifier, no retiming, or DSP or anything

As someone responsible for explaining to junior operations people why we call them ToR switches when they are in fact in the middle of the rack (due to efficiency of the copper cable lengths) could we please agree to stop calling them ToR switches?