Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's easy to use the perpective of hindsight to declare something is inevitable. Not only did he invent something, the underlying architecture was what was, in part, the key to Cisco's early success as the design scaled very well.
The guy's vastly underappreciated.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The social aspects of computing can be just as interesting as the actual technology. We have the tale here of a smart guy who got a project dropped on him to do some in-house work. His work (almost directly, and at the expense of litigation) evolved into Cisco's IOS.
The latter half of the article is even less about tech details than the first half, recounting his (mis?)adventures at Sun.
As a side note, either I'm missing something or he's being misquoted. IP has always been 32bit addressed, right? I'm assuming it's 3mbit ethernet that was 16bit?
-- Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
Invent and code in PDP11 *optimizing* assembler? 6 months seems like a prtty short time to me.
-- Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
What have YOU done in six months (or less) that would compare to this?
please excuse my apathy
6 months seems like a long time to invent a multi-protocol router You've obviously never written network protocol stacks. While an extremely competent developer might be able to crank out an IP-only router in about 2 months, supporting TCP/IP, Netware and NetBIOS simultaneously would probably take me (with 25 years experience in networking software) at least 6 months of C coding to write one from scratch, and that's assuming all protocols were well documented and no reverse-engineering was required, which probably was NOT true at the time. So while developing a router in 6 months doesn't strike me as impossible, his accomplishment certainly puts him in the top 5% of coders out there.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Huh? The piston is a fairly crappy use of steam power and is not seen very much today. The turbine on the other hand is a very efficient way to handle steam and the Aeolipile is an example of a reaction turbine. The biggest drawback of the Aeolipile is that it is a single stage turbine, to get the most efficient transfer of power from the steam you need a multistage turbine.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.