There's a decent chance that the GbE can fall back to 10Mbps ethernet, just as it can certainly fall back to 100Mbps ethernet. The 10Mbps Ethernet standard was released in 1982 (http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/05/09/19FEether.sb2_1.ht...), so I'm going to guess that by 1989 there must have been at least one 10Mbps card.
Edit: It occured to me I should check the timeline on 100Mbps ethernet. According to http://www.broadcom.com/company/timeline/ , the first 100Mbps ethernet product was shipped in 1994, so we're definitely looking at 10Mbps. (Note even if that's off one way or the other by a year or two it doesn't matter for this discussion.)
USB will be a problem, because they'll have to reverse-engineer the protocol, but I'm sure with work they could get it to fall back to a USB1 speed that they could figure out how to work with. The problem there isn't so much the USB as figuring out how to send keyboard events, but even then I bet they could figure it out pretty quickly since I'd lay money the USB keyboard standard is deliberately as close to the old keyboard standards as possible.
However, you are grotesquely underestimating the people of 1989 if you think they're going to be shocked by the idea of a "faster serial port with some defined standards for devices", and you're just factually wrong that they'll be confused by an ethernet port. RS-232 serial ports date back to 1969, and survived into the mid-to-late 1990s, for instance.
This is another one of those "there really isn't anything new in computing under the sun" things. It's hard to name an idea that someone from 1989 wouldn't have heard of or understand, they just lack the hardware to experiment with it for $200 1989 dollars.
Have more respect for your predecessors. They were not stupid. They just had much more expensive cycles.
Thank you, good point. Looking at the protocol on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonegotiation) it looks very reverse-engineerable with not much work, but yeah, it won't work out of the box.
RS-232 serial ports date back to 1969, and survived into the mid-to-late 1990s, for instance.
Did they? Funny, I was using one earlier today...
(And liking it. Nothing like plugging a device in and knowing there are no drivers, no 500Mb software downloads, no autoconfig, no software that has to spend minutes "searching" for the device, no wifi, no passwords, and that everything these days speaks 9600,8,n,1. Just beautiful gets-out-of-my-way simplicity. A joyous technology.).
Edit: It occured to me I should check the timeline on 100Mbps ethernet. According to http://www.broadcom.com/company/timeline/ , the first 100Mbps ethernet product was shipped in 1994, so we're definitely looking at 10Mbps. (Note even if that's off one way or the other by a year or two it doesn't matter for this discussion.)
USB will be a problem, because they'll have to reverse-engineer the protocol, but I'm sure with work they could get it to fall back to a USB1 speed that they could figure out how to work with. The problem there isn't so much the USB as figuring out how to send keyboard events, but even then I bet they could figure it out pretty quickly since I'd lay money the USB keyboard standard is deliberately as close to the old keyboard standards as possible.
However, you are grotesquely underestimating the people of 1989 if you think they're going to be shocked by the idea of a "faster serial port with some defined standards for devices", and you're just factually wrong that they'll be confused by an ethernet port. RS-232 serial ports date back to 1969, and survived into the mid-to-late 1990s, for instance.
This is another one of those "there really isn't anything new in computing under the sun" things. It's hard to name an idea that someone from 1989 wouldn't have heard of or understand, they just lack the hardware to experiment with it for $200 1989 dollars.
Have more respect for your predecessors. They were not stupid. They just had much more expensive cycles.