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Oh, sure, I remember 4Com. No, 3Com...

So, farewell then 3Com. The once-proud company, which seems to have spawned more than its fair share of friends among the IT industry, was snapped up this week by rival and one-time partner Huawei -- exemplar of the growing number of Chinese companies making inroads into the US-dominated IT industry.

Why do we care? In one sense, we don’t.

3Com long since ceased to be a significant player in the networking industry and, as an organisation, it was close to irrelevant. The people who work there won’t think so, and the people who service its channel, where it’s still strong, also won’t think so. But that, if you had to sum it up, would be how the rest of the industry perceives the Massachusetts-based company.

The company’s founder, Bob Metcalfe, invented Ethernet, which has to rank as one of the most successful technologies ever: all the world’s networks run over Ethernet, and it was 30 years old a couple of years back.

And in the 1980s, 3Com was a major player, tying up with Microsoft to produce LAN Manager. A network operating system, it was designed to compete with Novell’s NetWare, which pretty much owned the market.

Trouble was, LAN Manager’s platform, in the shape of OS/2, bombed and the concept of a network operating system faded away. There then followed a string of acquisitions, some more successful than others, all buoyed up by the exploding sales of Ethernet cards and chips.

More recently, it cut a deal with Huawei intended to get it into the Chinese market. It worked. Huawei got a look at 3Com’s books in the process and decided it liked what it saw. The rest is history.

Only the US Government’s twitchiness about the possibility of a Chinese company having access to 3Com’s security technology will stop the buy-out.

Whatever happens, here’s hoping it leads to a new lease of life for 3Com -- it could do with a boost.