[HN Gopher] The Real Origin of Cisco Systems (1999)
___________________________________________________________________
The Real Origin of Cisco Systems (1999)
Author : thunderbong
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-08-04 09:48 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tcracs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tcracs.org)
| bmenrigh wrote:
| Similar to this, RetroBytes (the Youtube channel) did a video on
| the origin of Cisco recently which is worth a listen at 2x
| https://youtu.be/NXTdwzjiW7E?si=bCVpmEkyf1UUCfyR
| burnte wrote:
| I just watched that, fantastic video.
| pdxandi wrote:
| I'm 10 minutes in and find the narrator is a bit hard to
| understand. There isn't much in the video beyond the audio,
| at least in the first part, so maybe the storytelling
| improves. I'll keep watching later.
| bmenrigh wrote:
| Yeah the actual video content portion of his videos varies
| a lot, but this one is basically just an essay that can be
| listened to.
|
| As for his British accent, I find him understandable at 2x
| speed, but there are many others I can only listen to at
| 1.5x
| jeffrallen wrote:
| In case people are suspicious/wondering about this story, it is
| credible to me. I worked with Bill Yundt and he told the story
| back in 1996. I've also seen the absolute lowest layers of Cisco
| IOS for 68000's and it certainly appears to come from that era of
| computing. One especially surprising and interesting thing to me
| is that it uses cooperative multitasking, not preemptive. This is
| how systems were written in those days, based on the limitations
| of early microprocessors. (At the same time in the industry,
| protected mode multiprocessing existed. But it was in big iron,
| controlled by IBM, Cray, Unisys and CDC. And those are all of the
| has-beens now: because technologies like microprocessors, even
| with their limitations, took over the industry.)
| burnte wrote:
| I still remember when preemptive multitasking became big in the
| X86 world in the late 80s/early 90s. It was a real sea change
| in OS stability. DESQView was fantastic but real preemptive
| multitasking was amazing. It was why I stayed on OS/2 until
| 1996 or 1997.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I still like it to this day for microcontroller projects.
|
| It's not that difficult to write code that iterates in chunks
| and yields now and then. Of course you want to avoid non-
| finite I/O calls (make use of timeout parameters where
| available).
|
| Things that need low latency (eg. counting encoder ticks) are
| still interrupt driven (or handled by dedicated peripherals).
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| The 68K lacked an MMU, so cooperative multitasking was really
| the only way to do it. Same reason MacOS and AmigaOS were
| cooperative multitasking.
| monocasa wrote:
| You can preemptively schedule without an MMU just fine, just
| like there's nothing stopping multiple threads in the same
| address space from being preemptively scheduled.
| spogbiper wrote:
| Microware OS9 implemented preemptive multitasking on the
| motorola 6809 without an MMU back in 1980. You don't have
| memory protection without an MMU, but you can have preemptive
| multitasking.
| mben wrote:
| AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking.
| vidarh wrote:
| The only thing you need to achieve pre-emptive multitasking
| is interrupts and the ability to cleanly save the current CPU
| state.
|
| The 68k lacked the ability to _resume with full state intact
| after a bus fault_ , which made an off-chip MMU painful (but
| there was one - the MC68451[1]), but this doesn't affect the
| ability to do pre-emptive multitasking at all.
|
| AmigaOS famously _did_ have preemptive multitasking - we used
| it to mock PC and Mac users with for years.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68451 Note that to
| do full virtual memory with a 68k, Motorola proposed using a
| _second_ 68k to handle page faults due to a design flaw:
|
| https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/correcting-errors-by-
| dupli...
| owenthejumper wrote:
| Yet another example of how government research drives modern
| innovation, and how the latest assault on it by the Trump
| administration will wipe out decades of innovation in the US
| themafia wrote:
| The irony is that the thing the government was trying to fund,
| use of AI in medicine, was almost entirely unrealized by this
| project.
|
| It's also apparent that Xerox's involvement and willingness to
| share it's new inventions in Ethernet with a University eager
| to form the early Internet played a huge part in driving this
| outcome.
|
| It seems almost completely incidental that we got an early
| implementation of a protocol router out of this. The government
| certainly wasn't trying to create one and I'm sure if they had
| actually involved themselves in that effort we would have
| gotten something far worse and far more costly.
|
| Since the administration wasn't capable and didn't create the
| innovation in the first place you probably don't need to worry
| about later administrations removing it.
| mhurron wrote:
| > Yet another example of how government research drives modern
| innovation
|
| As the article starts, that's not how Cisco, and by extension a
| lot of Cisco employees, tell it. To a whole lot of people,
| Trump is just clearing out lazy hangers on who are preventing
| real innovation.
|
| Cisco's story is two people working alone in their garage
| creating IP routing.
| knome wrote:
| https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/networking/19/375.
| ..
|
| this, too, mentions Yeager as the initial developer, and that
| CISCO licensed and enhanced his work from Stanford.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I worked at Cisco 1999-2001, it was my first job out of school. I
| worked in a group that did network management software, so we
| weren't touching iOS.
|
| But it was kind of wild at that point there were still company
| mailing lists where these old heads would argue about iOS
| internals and flame each other in front of the whole company.
|
| We still had a non-web bug tracking system while I was there. It
| was an interesting era! The product I worked on did have a web
| interface as essentially its only UI. We used Java, at some point
| we used MS Visual J++, and this was before JSPs existed. We used
| some proprietary templating engine to generate HTML.
| gjf wrote:
| Oh god, it wasn't ASDM for the ASA was it? Always one Java
| update away from not being able to manage your firewalls
| takinola wrote:
| Apparently, the relationships between the executive leadership at
| Cisco (especially Len and Sandy) were ... volatile. I took a
| class from one of the top execs in the early days and he had so
| many colorful stories about his time there.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Here's a complimentary article from Bill Yeager's perspective:
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1407787
|
| > I asked Len why he wanted my source code, and he told me that
| facilities wanted to take over the router/EtherTIP's development
| because I couldn't dedicate myself to full-time support of the
| system I had invented and developed with help from Mike and Benjy
| over the past five years. This request seemed reasonable to me,
| so I gave him the access he requested and thanked him for his
| willingness to maintain and improve the software. I didn't know
| that Len and Sandy Lerner had incorporated Cisco Systems a year
| earlier or that Len might have had an ulterior motive: to do a
| rewrite and then copyright the sources as Cisco Systems'
| intellectual property.
|
| > I learned about Cisco a year later when I was called into
| Stanford's legal department and told to bring a hard copy of my
| sources. Needless to say, I was a little nervous. Upon arrival, I
| was greeted by Stanford lawyer Iris Brest, who explained Cisco's
| existence and Len, Sandy, and Kirk's involvement. She then asked
| me to compare the Sumex-AIM sources with the EE sources that Kirk
| had written and tell her if I thought the work was derivative.
| Most of the EE sources could best have been described as
| plagiarized or paraphrased: variable names were changed,
| subroutines were renamed, and large data structures were broken
| into smaller ones, but identical parts abounded throughout the
| code. Kirk had added new features and removed others, but the
| "derivation" was obvious even to Iris who, from what I could
| tell, didn't have a technical background. She thanked me, kept my
| sources, and sent me on my way.
|
| > Just to be clear, I didn't object to the formation of Cisco
| Systems or its use of the code I had invented -- in fact, I was
| pleased that work of which I was extremely proud could be used in
| this manner. However, I did object to the theft of intellectual
| property implicit in Cisco's copyright on the sources.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-06 23:00 UTC)