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

Mon Sep 29 18:31:50 PDT 2025

Bill,
   This is very useful.
   So you've confirmed that the hardware base for workstation and 
'gateway' was a set of consistent 68000 / Multibus - based modules.
   Also that the multiprotocol (e.g., both PUP and IP) aspect was 
present in the SUN software.
   And that the SUMEX-AIM ARPA funding helped the broader effort. 
(Without those several episodes of AI hype, where would we all be?)
   And that the Golden router was PDP-11-based and provided by the MIT 
folks.

   You've also sort of confirmed that cisco was not defined in terms of 
products that we associate with the eventual router giant.  Len and 
Sandy were evidently indeed fond of the PDP-10 family of machines.  That 
the original cisco hardware product was an Ethernet interface for 
MASSBUS makes me smile.

   I don't dismiss the importance of respecting Intellectual Property 
etc.  But understanding how cisco quickly came up with a good quality 
set of routers is easier if you squint at things a certain way and think 
of the SUN plus cisco (plus SUMEX-AIM) efforts as combining "informally".
   After all, the transcontinental railroad was a tremendous 
achievement, despite the horrible robber baron skullduggery.

   Thanks again,
	-- Guy

On 9/29/25 6:42 PM, Bill Nowicki wrote:
> Hello Noel et al. Yes indeed, I was in the midst of the Stanford v. Sun 
> v. Cisco mix.  From the start of the Stanford University Network (SUN, 
> the acronym not the star) project, the justification for Andy 
> Bechtolsheim's hardware was to use off-the-shelf parts for a modular 
> design as much as possible. I drew some of the diagrams for the ARPA 
> proposal in 1979. We could take his CPU, frame buffer, and Ethernet 
> cards to make a workstation, but that was thought to be only for the 
> elite users. For normal people, we would get a CPU board and a couple 
> serial line cards to connect terminals. I wrote a very quick and simple 
> program (stand alone on raw hardware) some wag called an "Ether-TIP" 
> because it would perform a similar function as the TCP TIPs (erstwhile 
> TACs when they used ArpaNet only protocols, maybe). Another function was 
> putting two or more Ethernet cards into a bus with a CPU and calling it 
> a gateway (or "rooter" if you from Canada, eh?). Indeed, both my simple 
> multi-user Telnet program (which I called MUT as apropos) and the 
> original routing code done by Bill Yeager in the medical center used PUP 
> initially. Ironically, the Stanford University Medical Experiments on 
> Artificial Intelligence for Medicine (SUMEX-AIM) funding Bill Yeager's 
> work sounds like the hype cycle exploding right now. Since Yeager added 
> Telnet to his code, it made mine obsolete. His could do PUP as well as 
> IP routing, and at Stanford we used PUP networks to be IP subnets.
> 
> However, 1822 IMP interfaces were not so much commodity items. Luckily, 
> Jeff Mogul had been an undergrad at MIT, and Vaugh Pratt (now faculty 
> emeritus) had been teaching at MIT. MIT had a PDP-11 router developed 
> already, and we were tracking Dave Clark's work. So Noel kindly did a 
> custom build for us (called the "Golden" gate which became the IP 
> gateway to campus for other than the AI like KL10 and the TOPS-20 
> systems which had their own direct host connections. It was in the 
> basement of Margare Jacks Hall, the first time that the actual Computer 
> Science Department, in the school of Humanities and Science in 1979, had 
> equipment in the same building as professors.
> 
> My wife worked at one of those AI companies that was going to set the 
> world on fire in 1980. She thought it was funny that her terminal 
> connection said "Welcome to SU-Net" which was the exact same prompt with 
> capitalization and punctuation that Bill Yeager used in his code, but 
> the box was labeled "Cisco Systems". Supposedly Len Bosack re-layed-out 
> a board but the hardware was effectively Andy's, since it had been 
> designed when Len was Director of Computer Facilities for SU CSD. Very 
> soon after the AI startup ran through its money and went out of 
> business. I did hear that fairly quickly Kirk Lougheed and others at 
> Cisco rewrote the code and made it even more of a Swiss army knife, 
> doing all sorts of function on all sorts of network stacks.
> 
> Also probably while collecting Stanford salary, Len designed his own 
> first real hardware, which was a MASSBUS adapter to connect KL10 and 
> TOPS-20 machines to Ethernet, as I recall. It worked out for Stanford 
> since the MASSBUS Ethernet was really needed, but a niche market. Then 
> Stanford got a nice discount too. Yeager just recorded an oral history 
> at the computer history museum, and I had lunch with him a couple weeks 
> ago, still the same with fun stories.
> 
> Would be happy to give more details if someone cares.
> 
> Bill N.
> 
> 
> On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 01:43:55 PM PDT, Guy Almes via 
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Karl,
>    Very interesting.
>    The "transfer of technology" was (to be charitable) shockingly
> informal.  The story of the disputes (I think in 1987) are eyebrow-raising.
>    But, from an Internet History point of view, one problem with the
> disputes is that it created a kind of "off limits" cloud that has
> limited our understanding of the technical contributions of that era.
> 
>    Frankly, I would love to know more about the pre-cisco Stanford
> University Network technology developments.
>    The hardware design built around the Motorola 68000 / Multibus that
> gave us the original SUN (and cisco) routers and also the original SUN
> workstation are clearly of interest.
>    Similarly, the leadership of Stanford in understanding that they
> needed both workstations and the networking to connect them was
> historically important *if only* to allow us to understand the pre- and
> early history of SUN Microsystems and Cisco, two companies that
> contributed heavily to the emergence of the modern Internet.
> 
>    In addition, many at Stanford were clearly aware of the work at Xerox
> PARC, including its workstation and networking innovations.
>    I *think* that, at least for a period of time, PARC's PUP protocols
> were supported in Cisco's multiprotocol routers.  Is this true?  If so,
> was this PUP support also present in the SUN routers?
> 
>    It would be interesting to understand and recognize the contributions
> of the SUN and early cisco people, totally apart from disputes about
> "the other IP".
>      -- Guy
> 
> On 9/29/25 4:20 PM, Karl Auerbach wrote:
>  > When I was at Cisco there was a topic which seemed to be off limits -
>  > the legal disputes between Stanford and Cisco over the transfer of
>  > technology from Stanford to Cisco during those formative stages.  We
>  > were kinda nudged to not ask Kirk L. about these things.
>  >
>  > I never knew the details of these disputes, other than I got the
>  > impression that they were kinda ugly.
>  >
>  > My wife worked with Andy Bechtelsheim (sp) a few years later at SUN and
>  > I got the impression that he has lots of interesting tale about the
>  > formative periods of Sun and Cisco.
>  >
>  > Getting back to Cisco:
>  >
>  > When Geoff Baehr, Dave Kaufman, Frank Heinrich, and I were putting
>  > together the TRW response to the ULANA procurement from the Air Force
>  > Dave K. spent time with the Cisco folks.  David described Cisco as
>  > working out of a garage (but he could have meant rather sparse rented
>  > space that kinda had all the [dis-]comforts of a garage.)
>  >
>  >              --karl--
>  >
> 
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