It's pretty interesting that our archetypal wired network, Ethernet, was actually inspired by a wireless network. When I first learned about ALOHAnet, at least it was a surprise to me. Specifically, the main idea of "send at a random time, retry if there's a collision" in Ethernet's CSMA/CD was originally employed in the ALOHA protocol (which makes sense, as both networks operated on a shared medium, unlike today's Ethernet).
My father was on the DARPA side of the AlohaNet development and eventually moved out of network engineeing into software engineering within DoD. I had a discussion with him (probably 15-20 years ago?) about switched ethernet (years after he moved out of the networking space, so was no longer an area he kept up with), and he was said something along the lines of "what do you mean there are no collisions? the whole point of ethernet is dealing with collisions! if we didn't have to deal with collisions, LANs would have been easy!".
Consider that thicknet (and thinnet) looks alot more like wifi than TP ethernet does, the only thing missing is on thicknet all stations can hear each other. But it is fundamentally RF, and a shared medium.
