Bus topology is fairly old news and you probably won't be seeing much of these around in any modern office or home. With the Bus topology, all workstations are connect directly to the main backbone that carries the data. Traffic generated by any computer will travel across the backbone and be received by all workstations. This works well in a small network of 2-5 computers, but as the number of computers increases so will the network traffic and this can greatly decrease the performance and available bandwidth of your network. Also, because of the way the electrical signals are transmitted over this cable, its ends must be terminated by special terminators that work as "shock absorbers", absorbing the signal so it won't reflect back to where it came from. If the bus (the long yellow cable) is damaged anywhere in its path, then it will most certainly cause the network to stop working or, at the very least, cause big communication problems between the workstations.