Asynchronous Transfer Mode, often referred to as "After The Millennium".
There are whole books written on the topic of splitting network traffic into 53-byte "cells", but the fact that the cell payload is 48 bytes due to a committee decision (summarizing, one group wanted a 32-byte payload, another a 64-byte, and they compromised) kinda says it all.
Another nice anecdote is that I once had a 100Mbps ATM card (with an optical TAXI uplink) on my office PC. My PC was a 133MHz Intel box. The card had a MicroSPARC chip that outperformed it by at least a factor of four.
Yes, I'm altogether too much into it.