History of technology is littered with design mistakes. Quite a few are mercifully shortlived, and some, deservedly, just don't even see the light of day at all (sadly in some cases as they might be useful lessons in what not to do:-)
some mistakes aren't mistakes - one famous one was the choice between VHS and Betamax video tape formats - this was actually a tradeoff in cost/price/distribution and quality - in the end it didn't really matter.
Others somehow survive, grow and persist, and persist in having negative consequences for decades -
In Computer Science, these are things like the C++ language....enough has been written about that and alternative histories (if only Algol 60, or if only Objective C or if only people had written better compilers and libraries for functional languages earlier) -
In Communications Systems, two examples I'd pick: Bluetooth, and Edge.
An early workshop (25+ years ago) in california had presentations on bluetooth and explained why they had made it look like a serial lines (think COM3 on a windows box), stemming from everything lookling like circuits, or telephones to the folks who made this up. And Edge was made reliable (local retransmissions) to mask wireless packet loss, when everything should just "look like an ethernet", as I think Craig Partride put it. The cellular data folks eventually got it (and have done a number of other things much better than wifi), but bluetooth's horribleness persists, partly because the broken architecture was baked in to early software stacks, and is very very hard to persuade people to just ditch. In the IoT world, this led to a plethora of other wireless technologies (zigbee, lorawan etc) at least partly so people could avoid that fate, although there were other goals too.
Anyhow, we avoided being stuck with X.25, but we are stuck with QWERTY. We avoided being stuck with VHS, but we are still stuck with IPv4.
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