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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...
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.
In 20 years, undergraduate computer science students will be required to write virtual machine monitors.
Right now, I have taken classes that required me to write neural networks, and perform experiments on compute clusters.
20 years ago, this was a big deal.
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?
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?
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.
What have YOU done in six months (or less) that would compare to this?
please excuse my apathy
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.
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.
You must not have been around that long then as the development tools from the early 1980s were pretty primative by today's standards. I started working with computers in the early 1980's and we used primative line editors to write code. It was terrible as the editor forced you to relist your program over and over again. Making code changes like deletions, or insertions was very clunky and you could easly remove the wrong line or group of lines with an errant editor command.
I never saw a full screen editor until I started working on a DEC VAX system running VMS. It was the same thing with microcomputers like the Apple II or 8080 or Z80-based CP/M-80 systems. I was using a line editor until I got a copy of WordStar for CP/M-80 which gave me some full screen editing capabilites. The microcomputers were 8bit with a maximum of 64K of memory and there wasn't any memory protection. So an errant program could lockup a microcomputer very quickly.
I even managed to damage a few floppy disks in my Apple II when I was working on 6502 assembly code. My code went through and poked Apple DOS somewhere and the floppy drive unit turned on and did something bad to the floppy disk inside. The disk failed all attempts at reformating and so I just had to throw the disk out. The only fullscreen editor I ever saw for programming on the Apple II was the full screen editor in their Apple Pascal environment which was based on the UCD Pascal environment. The compiler generated pCode and was executed by a pCode interpreter written in 6502 assembly language.
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.