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An Interview With The Router Man

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-everyone-speak-the-same-language dept.

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."

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. No, it's not still here. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work in Pine Hall. I just looked in the aforementioned telephone closet, and, while there's still a chunk of thick-net on the wall, the router's gone.

  2. Re:it took him 6 months? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Read the article?

    It was not an easy task and the guy had only 56k of ram to work in on a primptive PDP11 with no networking hardware.

    It was homebrew to the core and he had to rewrite his software several times and write his own optimization code in assembly because even the best c compilers produced code that was too big.

    In that 56k or ram he used buffers to handle the 3 megs per second transfer rates. Pretty damn impressive and I would assume would be impossible.