[ih] The linux router project and wifi routers

[Bill Nowicki]

Oh yes, Tom's page is fairly accurate. The Stanford vs. Cisco story should be well known by now. In the early 1980s I was lucky to be friends with both Bill Yeager and Len Bosack, who each were smart people making contributions, as well as the others mentioned. I wrote some very early software for the original Stanford University Network project (SUN, vs. the company Sun, where I worker later from 1985-1989). 
The anecdote I would add might be the following. My wife worked at a now-defunct Stanford spin-off in the late 1980s, which was one of the first customers of both Cisco and Sun, since we knew each other. She showed me that their Cisco box used the prompt "Welcome to SU-Net", the original spelling that Bill Yeager used in his software, not mentioning the company Cisco at all. Cisco had not even bothered to change the prompt in those early days!    On Wednesday, November 2, 2022 at 10:05:04 AM PDT, Dave Taht via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 which among other things, spawned busybox, I once wrote up my
intersection with here:

http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.html

I didn't know the cisco story was similar. How history repeats itself!
I don't remember a whole lot about the linuxrouter project (dave
cinege
had some odd ideas), but it was pretty foundational to the birth of
the embedded linux market as a whole. Similarly, the story of busybox
is not particularly well known, but it combined the most common unix
utilities into one binary that *fit* into the limited amount of flash
and memory available in the 90s and early 2000s in a form that allowed
for extensive scripting for complex functionality, compared to the
all-in-one approach of OSes like windriver's.

There's also the handhelds.org project, which nobody remembers along
the brief flurry of app stores for linux-running handhelds in the
pocketpc era...

And also, uclinux.

On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:33 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> EXCERPT:
>
> The following account of the real origins of Cisco Systems, as opposed to
> the history often recounted in Cisco company literature, was written in
> 1999 by Tom Rindfleisch. Rindfleisch was Director of the SUMEX-AIM project
> (1973-1990), under which the software for a powerful Internet router system
> was developed and widely deployed at Stanford and elsewhere for research
> purposes. That code found its way, without approval from the original
> developers, to form the basis of the Cisco router...
>
> Tom Rindfleisch
> Last updated April 8, 1999
>
> [...]
> https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/
>
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
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> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history



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