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An Interview With The Router Man
Angry_Admin writes "For Network World's 20th anniversary, they've published an interview with William (Bill) Yeager, the creator of the multiprotocol router, with some history on how Cisco came to be. As he says in the interview : 'This project started for me in January of 1980, when essentially the boss said, "You're our networking guy. Go do something to connect the computer science department, medical center and department of electrical engineering."' 6 months later he had his first working 3MBit router shoved in a closet."
i guess i take all this stuff for granted, suppose since he was the first one to do it and all... but 6 months seems like a long time to invent a multi-protocol router...
and would you call this an invention? i mean yeah he invented it... but it seems like it was pretty inevatable, if he wouldn't have done it I'm sure someone else would have in short order...
don't want to sound like i'm belittling him, what he did was pretty cool, i'm just sayin...
Now we have craploads of protocols and routers to handle them all. Learning about routers and interoperability was probably the best part of my Networking course. Learning protocols like X.25, Kermit, ATM, and how each one of them has to handle encapsulating data. Just think of an ethernet frame fractured into ATM frames, put into TCP/IP and and sent over the internet, and then having to be converted back.
I don't get it.