[ih] Another birthday?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed at reed.com>

    > I'm not sure it's certain that Bill Yeager created the first
    > multiprotocol router

It turns out that a reporter (a good one) from the San Jose Mercury, a guy
called Pete Carey, did some lengthy research into this issue, which both Bill
Yeager and I helped him with. Bill and I talked on the phone several times,
trying to work out who did what when, but we were both kind of handicapped by
the lack of much in the way of written stuff to jog out memories.

I don't have the time/energy to give the whole song and dance now, but the
basic concept is that Bill and I apparently came up with the idea for the
multi-protocol router independently, at roughly the same time. I may have
been slightly in advance of him (since I had a single-protocol router running
before him, in March of '80 - no date is known for the first operation of my
multi-protocol router, but it was around the end of that year), but it's very
close.

I have a file of a lot of email back and forth between the three of us (and
some other people, like Mark Crispin and Jeff Mogul) during this effort, but
I don't want to release any of it without permission.

Peter never did get the space to do the whole story about the genesis of
multi-protocol routing (which he kind of backed into, his real interest was
in deflating some of Cisco's claims), but he did do a story which took on
Cisco. I'm not sure if it mentioned that Proteon started selling MIT-derived
multi-protocol routers in January of '86, some time before Cisco's' claimed
first router sales.


    > but in any case, Network World is doing "history" here.

Thanks for the tip. I'll drop them a line.

    > Anyone know what else was going on?

I'd love to hear about any other multi-protocol router (i.e. a single box
which handled multiple protocols in parallel - so-called "Ships in the Night"
- *not* wrapping, which was already a common idea, with the X.25 stuff) work
in the '80-'81 timeframe.

	Noel