Routers Bridge Computer Language Gap

Q Recently, Cisco Systems Inc. was listed as the top company in The Times 100. It makes routers. What are routers?

J. Linley, Torrance

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A A good way to think of a router is to imagine a dispatcher for a consortium of trucking companies in Europe. Imagine that each trucking company is run by its own set of rules, but they all need to be able to pick up and deliver cargo in each other’s territories. The dispatcher has to provide each with the best route from origin to destination, as well as speak all of the languages and know all the rules governing each company.

Computer networks are like individual European nations (or trucking companies). Each has its own language (known as a “protocol” in computer-speak) and rules and population. But this is the late 1990s and isolation doesn’t work anymore. This is the era of the “enterprise network,” where everybody needs to be able to communicate with everybody else.

Hence “internetworking,” where routers work behind the scenes as dispatchers to make sure that all the traffic on all the networks that are interconnected gets where it’s going in usable form.

Routers are really specialized computers that provide all the necessary networking communications hardware and software to perform that task.

Richard O’Reilly, The Times’ director of computer analysis, will answer readers’ questions of broad interest in this column. E-mail questions to cutting.edge@latimes.com, fax to (213) 237-4712 or mail to Answers, c/o Richard O’Reilly, Business Editorial, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.