[ih] Cisco origins (Was: when did APRANET -TIPs become known as -TACs)

[Barbara Denny]

 I think the terminal work was slightly later when Bill Westfield arrived at Cisco (Bill had also worked at SRI).  I think the first product was something more like a board but that part of my memory is very foggy and what I am recalling certainly might not be right.
barbara
    On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 02:15:47 AM PDT, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
     > From: Barbara Denny

    > BTW I am pretty sure Cisco's first product was not a router. I have
    > seen websites only talk about routers in the history of Cisco.

This is from memory, so take it with a big grain of salt. (Not iterested in
researching the point.) But I was very closely associated with these events...

My memory is that they did, roughly simultaneously, a multi-protocol router
_and_ a terminal concentrator - in fact, they were more focused on the
terminal concentrator at the very start. The router was based on prior work
at Stanford - Bill Yeager's work. I don't know about the Cisco terminal
concentrator - although I retain a vague memory that it had its roots in
prior Stanford work too. (I did a Web search for "Cisco terminal
concentrator origins", but nothing turned up.)


Amusing (in retrospect) story about this: Yeager's boxes were used _inside_
Stanford - but they never had ARPANET support. Stanford's first ARPANET
gateway was - a 'C Gateway' from MIT! So I was out there, sitting in the
terminal room in Margaret Jacks hall, working on 'Golden' (their C Gateway),
and in walks Len Bosack - who was then running Stanford's timesharing system
(a TOPS-20, IIRC).

We fell to chatting, and I explained to him my insight into why there was
going to be a _huge_ market for routers (roughly fixed ratio of PC's/routers;
common projections of how large the PC market was going to be; A+B=$$$.) A
year or so later, this compny called Cisco appeared.. :-)

I still have the configuration files for 'Golden'! (The binary loads for it
had to be created at MIT - at least at the start. I don't know if that ever
got moved to Stanford.)

A long time ago, in a universe far, far away...

    Noel
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