[ih] The linux router project and wifi routers

Thu Nov 3 05:52:00 PDT 2022

Bill, Geoff, et al.,
   As far as I know, Tom's page is accurate and it speaks primarily to 
the issue of who were the real contributors to the initial 'cisco' 
software (and AGS hardware).
   But my impression is that there is much more to the story.

   One sentence that caught my eye was "The software was licensed by 
Bosack and Lerner on behalf of Cisco Systems in 1986, through the 
Stanford Office of Technology Licensing."
   During spring 1987, however, when I was shopping for routers for an 
NSFnet regional network, I was made aware of quite a bit of uncertainty 
about whether Stanford was going to sue cisco over some Intellectual 
Property issues.  Evidently there was a settlement that gave Stanford a 
discount on buying cisco routers.

   So I was a little surprised to see Bill's comment that the Stanford 
vs. Cisco story was "well known".  Can someone send me a pointer to 
where this story is accurately given?

   Thanks,
	-- Guy

On 11/2/22 1:20 PM, Bill Nowicki via Internet-history wrote:
> 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:
> 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.html__;!!KwNVnqRv!E2yNRc88G-Ky3i9qOVTBYXsDxdn8fP9tTWzRaSl33OJ5GOBJhUttPuw3tTQTypbmBADPxrrnCjVYR3rPGDuUiT_tvw3ZhA$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.html__;!!KwNVnqRv!E2yNRc88G-Ky3i9qOVTBYXsDxdn8fP9tTWzRaSl33OJ5GOBJhUttPuw3tTQTypbmBADPxrrnCjVYR3rPGDuUiT_tvw3ZhA$>
> 
> I didn't know the cisco story was similar. How history repeats itself!
> I don't remember a whole lot about the linuxrouter project (dave
> cinege
> had some odd ideas), but it was pretty foundational to the birth of
> the embedded linux market as a whole. Similarly, the story of busybox
> is not particularly well known, but it combined the most common unix
> utilities into one binary that *fit* into the limited amount of flash
> and memory available in the 90s and early 2000s in a form that allowed
> for extensive scripting for complex functionality, compared to the
> all-in-one approach of OSes like windriver's.
> 
> There's also the handhelds.org project, which nobody remembers along
> the brief flurry of app stores for linux-running handhelds in the
> pocketpc era...
> 
> And also, uclinux.
> 
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:33 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> EXCERPT:
>>
>> The following account of the real origins of Cisco Systems, as opposed to
>> the history often recounted in Cisco company literature, was written in
>> 1999 by Tom Rindfleisch. Rindfleisch was Director of the SUMEX-AIM project
>> (1973-1990), under which the software for a powerful Internet router system
>> was developed and widely deployed at Stanford and elsewhere for research
>> purposes. That code found its way, without approval from the original
>> developers, to form the basis of the Cisco router...
>>
>> Tom Rindfleisch
>> Last updated April 8, 1999
>>
>> [...]
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/__;!!KwNVnqRv!E2yNRc88G-Ky3i9qOVTBYXsDxdn8fP9tTWzRaSl33OJ5GOBJhUttPuw3tTQTypbmBADPxrrnCjVYR3rPGDuUiT-mj0cR5Q$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/__;!!KwNVnqRv!E2yNRc88G-Ky3i9qOVTBYXsDxdn8fP9tTWzRaSl33OJ5GOBJhUttPuw3tTQTypbmBADPxrrnCjVYR3rPGDuUiT-mj0cR5Q$>
>>
>> --
>> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
>> living as The Truth is True
>> --
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
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> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
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