[ih] "The First Router" on Jeopardy

[Clem Cole]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 12:51 PM Steve Crocker <steve at shinkuro.com> wrote:

> The words “protocol knowledge” suggest to me the routing decision depends
> on which protocol the packet is part of.
>
But this is what many of the early commercial routers did in fact.  IP had
not yet 'won' and a lot of site had multiple protocols running on their
LANs.  Some were routable, some were not.   But mixed protocols was
probably more the norm in commercials and I bet University circles than not.

As I said, I know an early 3Com brouter but my memory is there were
others.  I think DEC made one or two.  Noel can tell us what Proeton did.
Cisco certainly was multiprotocol at some point.   FWIW: we had to work
with a couple of them at LCC that knew how to speak a number of protocols.
When we took over the Pathworks development for DEC, we had to set up a lab
in Burlington that tested of bunch of that stuff and ensure that Pathworks
would not do bad things in multiprotocol environments.


That said, IIRC even IP had different rules for routing so some type of
inspection was needed for it too, but I think that is beside the point.