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Unwinding Cisco's Not-So-Simple Beginnings
saridder writes: "There's a saying that behind every fortune is a crime, and
as we have learned with Apple, Microsoft, and others, Cisco is no
different. The SJ Mercury
has an article outlining and debunking the myth of Cisco's
founding."
Sheriff: I never met a rich man who didn't have a guilty conscience.
Wyatt Earp: I've already got a guilty conscience... I might as well have the money too.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The nameless techies or the men in charge?
i call it payback.
he got started with the hip-hop/R&B group 'Dru Hill'?
Hey look, Yet More Proof (tm):
...
Bickering, fighting, and arguing (er, I mean, competition) between intelligent grownups DOES lead to people making millions!
Well, there it is. I guess I havn't anything left to complain about
"Old man yells at systemd"
I'm pretty sure you can set you account up so that Slashdot only shows you stupid bullshit that doesn't matter.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
They'll be smitten and crushed for were lies the root of evil there will be destruction and chaos.
Perhaps the downfall of the internet is the beginning of the doom of Cisco. Perhaps in the future will nobody need any routers from Cisco anymore because everyone will use XIP and
And someday the sinners will find themselves in the gutter together with some old Cisco routers.
Repent brothers ! Repent your wikked ways !
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
so what? screw the middleman and take all the
credit. hell yeah!
Signing a contract with MS was a crime, certainly. But Apple's fortune already existed before any alleged crime may have occurred.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Didn't Apple PAY xerox large sums of money to get that tour of PARC?
Microsoft was the one who decided to grab the ideas for free.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
The nameless techies or the men in charge?
The men in charge (us), of course. Why? What are 'techies'?
You might find this story interesting as well.
most startup stories are sensationalized. "Two people started Cisco in their living room" sounds better than "after fighting Stanford for rights to technology and with the aid of a team of geeks, Cisco was born". Same with Jobs and Wozniak. the whole "Apple IIe invented in their garage" sound much better than "Wozniak was working for HP at the time and did most of the work at his desk". People like to hear stories about total nobodies who lived the ultimate American dream, that's all. I use Cisco because they make a good product, not because of their sensational "against all odds" story.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Why so smart people never gets profit of they work?
I think that the problem is not why they don't get profit. But why so many companies care more for patent an invention than to make it work better.
No body has readed the GPL/GNU license?
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
and regular smart people. That's how things are "invented." Lock the smartest person in the world in a cave from birth and you will get nothing useful. Give him ideas from other people to build on and you get products and innovations.
Let's remember that when we argue for the necessity of patents.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
This is a case of "Winner Take All"
MIT seems to have excelled the best at making "spin-off" projects. I suppose they probably feel they've been burned by some of their startups, too. The same with NCSA.. heh.
When Standford lost their cherry in this game, they should have laid down again and found new partners.
I dont know the status of Stanfords holdings today, but rejecting as a matter of policy founder shares in Cisco was just plain bad for business. Seems they could have been giving away alot more free education today, and that would have been the best payoff imaginable.
What a way to Rip Off BBSPOT Interviews and articles(Serveral hours later) What ru going to call the site Slashspot.org!! HAHAHA... For NEWER news check out BBSPOT NEWS Give a little Credit where credit is diservered. All the Sites Founder Brian Briggs had to say was, "Its a Sad day for Open Source when something as Attroicious as this can occur. Bill Gate would be Happy."
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
The article mentions the PBS special Nerds 2.0.1 but doesn't link to the compendium site, which is worth checking out. Check out the Nerds 2.0.1 site, or more specifically, the section on Cisco.
It was a good series that is defiantly worth checking out if its on your local PBS station.
forma3
Did you read the article at all? They took software written by other Stanford people, loaded it onto PCBs they were having built at Stanford's shops, and selling them for their own profit. The only "opportunity" that was capitalized here was the opportunity to rip off a lot of smart and hard working people.
Reminds me of that devil sketch by Rowan Atkinson ("Mr Bean") in which he tell the atheists in the audience:
You must be feeling a right bunch of nitwits!
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
In the movie Ransom Mel has done a little dirty work to get things going, but if you do better good then bad then everything is ok right? Huh, maybe not, but if it is Cisco...it ok, but MS is just evil, my 38 pesos.
JC32AD
Back in 1986 the first router company sent a vice president to California to check out some companies there as canidates for a buy out. After much thought the executive decided that Cisco was going nowhere, and they bought a slightly larger router company down the street from Cisco.
Long timers at Network System belive that if the executive had decided to buy Cisco instead of the other company, you wouldn't have heard of Cisco today, instead that other company would have been dominate. How things change, Network Systems no longer makes routers, having realised that Cisco won the market long ago.
I read slashdot since a year ago.
/. users are like you.
And I think that is poor open minded to foreign posters.
If you want to correct my sentences it's ok, but if you try to know from what country I'm only reading me, you have a worse problem that I and my english.
I have readed the GPL, and in my country Free (Libre) and Free (Gratis) is writed with diferent words.
Why english has the same word for Libre and Gratis?
May be because you can buy and sell freedom.
It's luky that not all
I'm from Spain. We use Cisco routers, we use Micro$oft and Linux and have problems like Americans, but it's true than we don't talk english.
I has to apologize for that?
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
Apparently humor will not be tolerated today :-(
I'm not sure if Woz attended, but I can't see him passing it up...
Cheers,
- RLJ
I'm very happy about cisco's success. But none the less, Stanford recieves a huge amount of public money - and the intellectual property that Cisco has should rightly belong to the public domain.
I really have no objection of them using it, or being successfull becaus of it, but locking everyone else out is what I really have a problem with. (especially since I probably paid for it)
I find it ironic that the anti-establishment, anti-government intervention nerds of the valley keep forgetting that they are chowing down on public money. I think its a stretch to classify Cisco's history as criminal; more of a case of biting the hand that fed you.
Lerner also acknowledges the many contributors, saying in an e-mail to the Mercury News, "The only person I'm certain had nothing to do with it is Al Gore."
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
This is a nice story, but the good old cisco that made products that actually worked is LONG gone. Since about 1998, cisco has turned into Cisco, and is more interested in selling new products that need at LEAST 6 more months development before they should be sold, or alltogether vaproware (eg. IP phones). Cisco's favorite line regarding IP phones could be translated to read "Well, we know pretty much every PBX system made since the 70s can do that now, and we gurantee we'll get that working eventually, so just go ahead and buy it now and we'll get it done for you." What they fail to mention is that in 6-12 months when the product you have actually works, you have to pay for it all over again. Any fellow cisco guys able to back me up on this? Remember the Cat2900XL (WS-C2924-XL) vs. Cat2900XL (WS-C2924XL-A or -EN), or how about anyone who is unfortunate enough to have a Cat6000 MSM card they're using? (They don't do about half of what a Layer-3 engine should do, and Cisco won't give you two cents credit towards the MSFC which actually works). Anyone remember the 2500/4500 days when it never even occurred to you that there was a hardware or software problem? Compare that to now, when it's common knowledge that when Cisco releases ANYTHING new, be it router hardware, or IOS releases, don't even bother thinking about it for 6-12 months until it actually works. I'm ranting and raving here, I know..but as someone who has worked with cisco products for quite a few years (and has a CCIE nonetheless, thank you) I can tell you that the REAL cisco died long ago, when John Chambers capitalized the "c" and turned cisco into yet another soulless "sell it now, make it work later" company. Perhaps we could get the original gang together to build stuff that works again??
ah yeah, the good old days. Too bad there weren't any. Oppurtinity lies in the future. Don't believe the hype... you are buying that hype hook line and sinker, no offense intended.
-pyrrho
But, unfortunately we are stuck with Cisco. As yet there is no "Linux" equivalent in the router world, no one to challenge Cisco's dominance.
Sure, there are other companies and numrous startups that think they are going to change the world but, none of them have a product line the is sufficient to challenge Cisco's market presense. For a while Nortel seemed to be up for the challenge and was making good headway but, with the economic downturn, even Nortel is abandoning the charge.
The fact is, Cisco's stuff has turned to crap but, it still seems to be the best that you can get, overall. Perhaps when the economy turns around, someone will rise to the challenge.
Could she have been more abrasive? And now she's suing because she sold out too early and is only a millionaire and not a billionaire?
Nice crowd at Stanford.
Umm, the intellectual property that Cisco used has long since been mutated into something that doesn't even resemble the original code. Sorry, I think you're beating a dead horse here. 15 years ago maybe you could have made that argument, but not today.
They sure have an interesting corporate culture. Check out Employees.org, a sort of "freenet" for Cisco employees, consisting of an old sun with a probably unauthorised connection in the DMZ of Cisco's data center.
:)
And lets not forget Cisco employees on IRC with hostnames like "ph33r.cisco.com"
Looks like a fairly interesting place to work
... is universities using students as slave labor.
Universities engage in scientifically uninteresting joint projects with the industry to raise money. They employ students as free labor. The students get units, the lab gets unearmarked funds and the industry gets cheap software.
The head of our lab called it prostitution. Since most students don't have a choice, you might as well call it forced prostitution.
Umm, the intellectual property that Cisco used has long since been mutated into something that doesn't even resemble the original code. Sorry, I think you're beating a dead horse here. 15 years ago maybe you could have made that argument, but not today.
AHH, but the intellectual property that they started with was used as the foundation for all their new R&D. The fact that the public provided the seed, should entitle them to this equity. It would be like if I robed the Fed, kept 15 years worth of interest, and then returned it back expecting nothing of it. No - it's doubtfull that intellectual property should be as omnipresent as it is to begin with, but that the taxpayers should plant the seed is outrageous.
It sounds like every member of the "Blue Box" team had the ability and the resources to create a network router company. How come so few of them did?
Most university IT staff and faculty have the skills to work elsewhere, and in many cases they could make more money doing research for a private firm. But they don't. Why not?
Universities are an excellent source of research because there are lots of smart people with free time, resources and interesting problems to solve. I doubt that most of these people are interested in founding startups because that involves a lot of hard, boring work. If these folks really wanted to make a ton of dough all they needed to do was move to the private sector.
While I do think that the original Blue Box team should get credit for the invention there is nothing wrong with taking a university research project and making a product out of it. This is how useful technology moves from the exclusive confines of the school system into the world.
That's a good one!
ROTFLMAO
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Thong - th -thong thong thong!!! opps wrong Cisco :)
I am JimmyNickarZ, hear me roar.
My dad's who work uses these things. Plug them into into any cisco router and there's you office extentions. Isn't that an IP phone or am I missing something?
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Chuck Yeager was of course the legendary and first amongst the sky daredevils from the Edwards Air Force Base when he broke the sound barrier, but never got due credit for it after John Glenn and Co. received all the accolade for their space walks. And now William Yeager...
Drug companies are especially guilty of this crime, greatly inflating their research costs and downplaying the fact that most basic research is done through highly efficient government and private grants at the public research institutions.
Anyone know where they got the name "cisco" from?
I was guessing Computer Information Systems COmpany, or it could have just been as simple as crisco spelled incorrectly.
The story of Cisco is more interesting than JUST its intial beginnings. The author of the SiliconValley article cannot be as comprehensive as a good book. Cisco is a very talented and clever organization of people with a very interesting business model (imperialistic in a sense). Cisco Connection is a well-written story about the conecton of Cisco and its dealings and dynamics over the last decade and a half. Very interesting corporate reading.
Yeager is named in the agreement document as the principle developer/inventor, and received 85% of the royalty distribution (which he contributed to the SUMEX project to support further research) .... Still, Yeager never benefited from that venture (nor was he given an opportunity to by the organizers of Cisco Systems). Nor has he received public recognition for his major contribution to Cisco's founding and success.
Giving Yeager public credit is all fine and good and well deserved, however he DID receive money from Cisco in 1986 (85% of $150,000 as far as I can tell) and gave it away! IMO, he (or anyone else) is not allowed to comment about not being adequately paid for his efforts.
A few of the people involved even admitted that Cisco's success was questionable. To get a lump sum of money like that from a company that could very well be vapour in a short amount of time is quite an accomplishment.
Now just think that if he had used his technical knowledge to invest that cheque in 2 dozen or so hi-tech companies of that time, he could have been a rich man.
All he gets out of the deal is a clear conscience and thereby revokes his license to complain about the fact he didn't get paid for it.
</devils-advocate>
That said, it's obvious that his contributions were large and he will be forever known as one of the few 'good guys' of the 'Internet Revolution'. A little bit of humility and hard work can go a long way. Let's just hope that more people are motivated by technology instead of corporate greed in the future. Yeager sets quite an example for all of us.
----- rL
I think Cisco is overrated. Sure I like the routers, but try to compare their products, switches load-balancers to other like Foundry or Extreme. Compare prices, features and performance.
Then they don't look so great to me, I think they have "watered out" their name by buying all kind of companies and then slapping their logo on a lousy product.
As in 'San Fransisco'
ever wonder where the original Golden Gate Bridge
icon on the front of the boxes came from?
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime." -- Balzac Balzac is the first line to the "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo
That quote was actually from this article written by Tom Rindfleisch, linked in a +5 post ... forgot to mention that ...
----- rL
Apple needed MS -- from day one of the Mac where they needed desperately a word processor and then an office suite -- Jobs came to MS. Arguably they still do -- not for the measly investment but for the office suite and support. Running MS office legitimizes Apple and means their not a third rate run of the mill soon to be has been (Linux).
Secondly -- Apple stole the ideas from Xerox just as Bill G. stole them from Apple -- Jobs is less of a choir boy than Bill G -- just Bill is better at technology, business and knowing how to go in for the kill in this field. Steve suffers from Bill envy just like most of Ellison and McNealy.
I think its important to realize that many, many of the riches created by individuals and corporations (no corp. bashing, here I swear) were manufactured through illicit means.
The Astor family of the Waldorf-Astor Hotels, etc. started off as tenement owners, including more than one building that collapsed or burned killing, in at least one instance, hundreds. But now they're ligit.
The Kennedy's we all know sold liquor during prohibition. Went ligit.
Bush's (No Bush bashing here) grandfather (no the other) sold Nazi war bonds in the US and were busted for it. Went ligit (some disagree).
The list can be much longer, those are just the big ones. Cisco is no exception nor are nearly all industries in Germany that existed in World War II (no German industrialist, no matter how bad they treated slaves were tried at Nuremberg).
The point being? If you can make enough money, and prove that you are more valuable to society (so that means A LOT of money) and you turn over a new leaf (or just quit cheating, stealing, cultivating) you win, as do you children. Sure maybe some guy will write a book or post a message on Slashdot but who cares, you won't have to ever work again.
Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, being immoral and unethical does OFTEN pay off. Don't be stupid, be Good and wait till the benefit is great enough, then make you move. Risk big, win big.
Ian says "Reward good behavior, Punish poor behavior"
"The Office of Technology Licensing happens to hold the licensing rights for the DNA polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which is the basis for most biotech."
No they don't. Hoffman-LaRoche and Applied Biosystems, Inc., hold the patents for all of the commercially/experimentally important parts of PCR. And PCR was invented at Cetus, a private research house.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Shoot, that makes it sound like the folks who "stole" the code from Stanford did nothing. If you had seen the gateways being used by Stanford and those being sold by Cisco - there was a big difference. That difference was the difference between a product that could be marketed and one that could not. Len and Sandy are extremely smart people and there were a lot of people at Stanford who kicked themselves for not seeing the potential in what they did. (And many that did and joined up.)
Depends on California law, methinks.
First, all the major network developers saw the need for routers. Xerox PARC had had PUP/XNS routers for a while, based on Alto machines. PDP-11/34 minicomputers running Dave Mills's "fuzzball" code had been routing IP datagrams since 1981 or so. BBN had several routers. I built an IP router myself at Ford Aerospace in 1985, using a VMEbus cage with a Motorola 68000 and some Ethernet boards. I'd previously had a VAX doing routing in its spare time. So how to do it was understood.
I knew about the Stanford routers, but felt that their Multibus card cages weren't solidly enough built for deployment. (Remember, I was at an aerospace company.) Commercial VMEbus stuff was starting to appear, and that seemed the way to go, even though it cost more.
We were trying to get away from multiprotocol routers, which add an extra layer to everything. We were thinking "TCP/IP everywhere", rather than routing SNA, DECnet, XNS, X.25, and TP4 (all of which have been forgotten) over the same wires.
But a mass market for routers seemed a long way off. Ford Aerospace had built some big digital networks for DoD in the past, and they typically had 10 to 100 switching points. Management didn't see a case for a volume product. (Ford Aerospace had been badly burned on some previous products that were too early, like a really nice projection TV in the 1970s).
The major vendors were all fighting TCP/IP in favor of their proprietary network protocols. This was the era of the "PC LAN". Ungermann-Bass, Network Systems, and 3COM all had incompatible PC LANs. IBM had three PC LANs which wouldn't talk to each other.
Cisco was more of a marketing success than a technical one. There was no real obstacle to building a router by 1984 or so. But selling lots of them looked hard.
Dr Mullis was (is?) a well-publicized advocate of LSD, as i recall.
h tm l
http://gtalumni.org/news/magazine/sum94/mullis.
When you are on the right you can call crimes a sin :-)
and forget it right ? Go read the history
you have a capitalist brain, dumbo :-)
an Anonymous Coward who
1. is ignorant of the reality of IP Phones
2. is biting the hand that feeds him
3. claims to be a CCIE !! - yeah right...
Remember, you always have the option of running rock solid GD code, and forgoing fancy new s/w features.
Most ISP's run GD releases of SP code, that is 11.2.x , where x is large number - ie > 20
Darren Kruse CCNP CCDP
WAN/LAN Networking Consultant
mailto://darren_kruse@hotmail.com
www.geocities.com/darren_kruse
Makes you wonder what _really_ happened in Finland ten years ago, doesn't it? :-)
very few ideas, if any, spring from the mind of one individual. In reality all high-tech ideas leverage the ideas of many who never get attribution. That's just a fact.
Yeah, that's the point of patents: to make sure good ideas get spread around and seed more good ideas, instead of being hidden and exploited to lesser profit in secret; it's also a major ideological objection to granting monopoly power to any one entity. It cuts both ways.
Are you sure you know which side you're arguing?
Get MacOS Universal Headers 3.x. Look into "Fonts.h" (or whatever holds the bitmap font structure). Now get the PalmOS 3.5 SDK. Look into the file holding their bitmap font structure. Compare field names and comments. Bingo. Enjoy and discuss on Slashdot.
Honestly, I believe that if the world would be forced into 100% license compliance as intended by IP lawyers and certain parts of big business, technology advance would grind to a halt.
And so do most religions, too...
When a company grows big and successful, they usually build a "sanitized" and romanticized version of their startup story. In it, all the big battles are edited out, the people who wound up on the outs disappear from the history rolls, and everything is edited to make them look like a small, humble company that did well.
So Apple and HP get the myth of the garage story, Cisco hides their battles with Stanford, and Microsoft sells Gates as a Harvard dropout (conveniently leaving out the family connections he used to get Microsoft in all the right places). The creation myth is what you get when you read Fast Company - but the true stories are out there and easy to find. It's just not what the companies themselves are trumpeting.
Remember, in business as well as politics, history is written by the winning side.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
the point of patents: to make sure good ideas get spread around and seed more good ideas
Is that why companies spend thousands on each patent; so the ideas can spread around and seed more good ideas? Sounds like an opportunity for a shareholder lawsuit.
Stop believing the 4 color PR brochures. The USA's founding fathers' intent is not the same as todays intellectual monopoly reality. Patents keep you and me from leveraging ideas.
Good luck reading up on existing patents to seed new ideas. US courts have created a catch 22 where you are advised not to read them:
1. You can be sued for patent infringement even if you did not infringe. This is done when the competition knows it has more money to spend in court than you do.
2. If you lose a patent infringement case, the punitive damages are several factors larger IF it can be shown that you read the existing patents. Your opinion of the existing patent has no bearing on this punishment.
3. US courts have established that only Patent Attorney's are authorized to form an legitimate opinion regarding probable patent infringement. (See #2 above.)
Is this what the founding fathers intended? This is what we have. "Invent" something useful and then patent it for kicks. Let us know how it goes. If a big company feels threatened by your product, they will take care of you. The patent system is their big stick, not yours.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
"There's a saying that behind every fortune is a crime"
I think that quote is from Balzac.
Sincerely,
A Quote Geek
You can thank Steve Woston for Google.