[jedberg]

It was off the shelf hardware but then the software was customized by my coworker. He had to write some C and assembly for it.

[exikyut]

I wonder if someone with more industry knowledge might be able to hazard a guess what kind of off the shelf hardware.

You didn't say VHDL (or maybe this was irrelevant for switching circa 2000?), so I'm really curious what architecture was in use. (That's really all my question is; CPU architecture / system design)