It sometimes seems that there are computer people on the one hand and telecommunications and networking people on the other, and never the twain shall meet, so that things like bridges and hubs and routers and telephone switches are never recognised or treated as the computers they are: shedding a helpful gleam of light on the darkness, 3Com Corp tells us that it uses Motorola Inc 68000 family chips – the communications-specific variants presumably – in its hubs and uses the same chip for stackable hubs and chassis on the grounds that it is a cheapish chip and fairly portable across the different devices; it also uses a low-end Motorola chip in bridges and routers but switches to RISC for its high-end routers, opting for the Advanced Micro Devices Inc Am29000; it calls the operating system within the hub a SmartAgent and the agent controls the hub functions and turns it on and off, counts data packets and performs any other management functions needed, acting rather like a switch that enables and disables the port; the 3Com bridges and router run a kernel that is proprietary to 3Com and performs the core functions like TCP/IP routing within the bridge or router; it is derived from Unix but has been customised by 3Com; and all the software is written in C.
