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Notes -
There are two kinds of network switches/hubs (well, there are more, but at least two). The dumb one just essentially pretend everybody is on the same bus, and so every port gets all the traffic from other ports. This of course is only good for very simple small networks. Smarter switch would remember which IPs and MAC addresses live on which ports and forward the packets accordingly. Of course, smarter switches are more expensive than the dumb ones. For bigger networks you'd have configuration capacity in the switch to tell it which networks live on which ports.
I don't think you'll see a true 'dumb switch' (technical term 'hub') in ethernet from a major store; I haven't seen a new one since back when 10/100mbps switches were just phasing in. But they definitely existed, and it wasn't uncommon for one person to be able to bog down an entire intranet.
In the modern day, the distinction between 'dumb' and 'smart' switches is usually going to emphasize 'smart' switches as having optional routing functionality, (aka 'layer 3 switching'). This technically means that the layer 3 switch has one or more ports that can be configured into a router mode, though in practice it'll be missing a lot of other functionality you'd expect from a small home or office router (almost always missing NAT/PAT, usually not having DHCP or DNS).
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