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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."
...the first ASCII pictures of boobs were sent from the computer science department to the engineering department...
I hate taking this from someone who earned it
Mr. Router, that's his name, his name again is Mr. Router.
This guy is a neighbor of mine. He always spouts off shit like an old crazy man about how he invented the Internet, and this and that. I always tell him that he is wrong, and that Al Gore invented the Internet.
Now I feel like an ass.
Mad skillz yo.
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.
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.
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?
I saw Heron of Alexandria on Discovery a while back. He was quite the mechanical engineer, apparently. One of his inventions, called an "aeolipile", pictured in the Wikipedia article, is the first recorded steam engine. The upshot is that he invented it sometime between 150 BC to 0 AD.
Quoth that article:
the first recorded steam engine, (known as Hero's Engine) which was created almost two millennia before the industrial revolution, which was powered by steam engines. Apparently Hero's steam engine was taken to be no more than a toy, and thus its full potential not realized for quite some time.
My point is that, just because something seems inevitable doesn't mean that it is. People miss the obvious all the time, and due to the most incredibly mundane reasons. If not for inexplicable lack of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative and inventive guy, the industrial revolution could conceivable started in Greece around the time of Christ.
It took almost 2000 years before it was obvious to someone else. Inevitable? Maybe. But it might have been your grandkids' grandkids who created the internet, if this guy hadn't hit the right set of circumstances.
because they swiped someone else's code, and took credit for something that wasn't theirs.
Every day, we hear tripe about how "for businesses to succeed", we need strong IP laws to encourage them: but time and time again, we find out that the real innovation happens outside corporations: in universities and startups, and then the sharks in the suits swoop in, lie about what they have and what it can do, lie to the public and the shareholders, and claim to have been the "innovative" ones, and that the "hand of the market" is responsible for their success.
In this case, we have evidence of yet another company that succeeded through underhanded tactics, and yet has trumpeted to the stars just how "innovative" they were. And yet again, their "innovation" was the result of a lie.
IP laws don't work; they don't reward the innovator; and they're a bad idea; because you can't get around a basic law of business -- people who spend their lives trying to find underhanded ways to screw you over will probably succeed unless you work just as hard to stop them; and the people who are focused on doing good, honest work are too busy trying to get stuff done to notice the sneaky corporate weasles that are up to no good and out to steal their work.
I get my Network World every week like clockwork, and they seem to accumulate somewhere around my desk in a little pile. This article caught my eye, and I read it from start to finish twice. It was really quite fascinating. I understand routing, and while it is fairly simple these days, I can't imagine trying to code the first one. There was nothing to base anything on. He didn't just write the code, he invented the theory, tested it, and proved it could work.
By the way, the whole issue is one that everybody should read, even if only for the timelines. Most issues have at least one interesting article in them, although this is by far the most interesting.
Just my 2 cents
didn't this guy have a flight sim back when my XT was in full force? or am i dreaming?
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
He didn't have any legacy code to contend with! (only half kidding).
Segments Packets Frames Bits Which paired up with All People Seem To Need Data Processing. Oh the mnemonics we would share. :P
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
the past is cool, but it is just that. past. what i found most interesting in TFA was what Mr. Yeager is up these days. like his new patent for a P2P net called "Peerouette-Network" and what it will be capable of. have a read . http://www.freshpatents.com/Global-community-namin g-authority-dt20060112ptan20060010251.php
I remember visiting my dad at the UCSC computer center. There was an observation window with a view into their brightly lit dinosaur pen. There were rows of computers and tape drives that looked more like appliances. People were scurrying around attending to the care and feeding of these machines.
A few years ago I went back to this same computer center. The lights were off and no one was there. There were a variety of behemoth machines in the shadows around the room that looked like they hadn't been fired up in years. There was a row of relatively tiny Sun servers running down the middle of the room that appeared to be handling the workload that previously took a room full big iron. My dad showed me one Vax 11/780 in the corner that was still being used as a mail server. But there was already a plan to decommission this last vestige of a bygone era, thanks to its enormous appetite for power.
News for nerds, where we still don't know the difference between MB and Mb, where we also don't know that gig/meg is both plural and singular and doesn't require an S since it's not english.
Thought so.
Originally set by jumpers on the Alto backplane.
*AND* he was the first man to break the speed of sound? Oh, wait, wrong Yeager
Quoting Yeager
I always ran into walls at Sun, company politics, and that never worked out too well. When I was at Stanford there was a rule: The best engineering wins. Simple, straightforward. If your engineering is better than the other guy's, yours got the blue ribbon. Well at Sun, and at companies in general, it's different. It's the politically correct software that gets productized.
Which is recipe for disaster as technology wins 9 times out of 10. Audio compression + internet + PC are reshaping the music business kicking freeloader rentier companies away from the profits ; if the CEO CIO and whatnot were to decide the fate of technology, MP3 was certainly going to be canceled.
Obviously the abovesaid managers will complain that MP3 reduced the value of music and that Mp3 caused more unemployement, less developement of music etc etc. They are right when they say MP3 collapsed their artificial scarity profit scheme, their copyright abuse and incredible overpricing.
Imagine what cool technology is being canceled right now, because of that reasoning.
And here she is.. my beautiful Angela..
Among the first women you could fax to a friend.
Angela ASCII
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Surely I'm not the only one who saw that headline and immediately had my internal radio station playing "Rocket Man", only as "Router Maaaaan..."
56 kilobytes? Luxury! When I was young, we had 6 bits, and I had 13 coworkers to share them with. We didn't have high-level toys like an optimizing assembler, either -- we had to go in and change the bit states by hand.
Yes
J. Noel Chiappa wrote multiprotocol router software while at MIT and licensed it to Proteon, a token ring networking company. Proteon sold the p4200 multibus multiprotocol router with token ring fiber optic backbones quite a while before cisco built their first AGS router. Some might say that Chiappa stole the MIT code, like cisco stole the Stanford code. But there is no doubt that a Proteon p4200 could be bought before cisco had any product for sale. Left coast techno bias, I suppose.