An Interview With The Router Man

Angry_Admin writes "For Network World's 20th anniversary, they've published an interview with William (Bill) Yeager, the creator of the multiprotocol router, with some history on how Cisco came to be. As he says in the interview : 'This project started for me in January of 1980, when essentially the boss said, "You're our networking guy. Go do something to connect the computer science department, medical center and department of electrical engineering."' 6 months later he had his first working 3MBit router shoved in a closet."

You are belittling him.

[winkydink]

It's easy to use the perpective of hindsight to declare something is inevitable. Not only did he invent something, the underlying architecture was what was, in part, the key to Cisco's early success as the design scaled very well.

The guy's vastly underappreciated.

I'll say it again

[C. E. Sum]

The social aspects of computing can be just as interesting as the actual technology. We have the tale here of a smart guy who got a project dropped on him to do some in-house work. His work (almost directly, and at the expense of litigation) evolved into Cisco's IOS.

The latter half of the article is even less about tech details than the first half, recounting his (mis?)adventures at Sun.

As a side note, either I'm missing something or he's being misquoted. IP has always been 32bit addressed, right? I'm assuming it's 3mbit ethernet that was 16bit?

Re:it took him 6 months?

[C. E. Sum]

Invent and code in PDP11 *optimizing* assembler? 6 months seems like a prtty short time to me.

Re:it took him 6 months?

[malraid]

What have YOU done in six months (or less) that would compare to this?

Re:Things have come so far.

[teckfrek]

Clearly, you didn't listen in your best class. TCP/IP is encapsulated in ethrenet frames which are encapsulated in ATM Cells which are then multiplexed onto either TDM or SONET backbones. All of which is part of the Internet.

Re:it took him 6 months?

[Locke2005]

6 months seems like a long time to invent a multi-protocol router You've obviously never written network protocol stacks. While an extremely competent developer might be able to crank out an IP-only router in about 2 months, supporting TCP/IP, Netware and NetBIOS simultaneously would probably take me (with 25 years experience in networking software) at least 6 months of C coding to write one from scratch, and that's assuming all protocols were well documented and no reverse-engineering was required, which probably was NOT true at the time. So while developing a router in 6 months doesn't strike me as impossible, his accomplishment certainly puts him in the top 5% of coders out there.

Re:Christ on a Locomotive?!

[TheRaven64]

Hero's steam engine was little more than a toy. It was a neat proof-of-concept device, showing that it was possible to generate motive force from steam, but it was not practical. It required the invention of the piston - a device much more complicated than the Aeolipile ) to build an efficient steam engine.

It might have been possible to use some gearing to generate a useful amount of torque from an Aeolipile, but the power output would have been lower than, that obtainable from wind (although, perhaps, more reliable). The real innovation of the Industrial Revolution was the school of thought that said useful motive force can come from sources other than human or animal muscles.

Re:Christ on a Locomotive?!

[Talondel]

One could easily argue that the real innovation of the Industrial Revolution was the moral shift that slavery was wrong. Without access to nearly free or cheap slave labor, the need for motive force from a source other than human muscle was greatly increased.

There was no use for a steam engine in Greek society, because there was no significant moral objection to the use of slave labor, which kept cheap manual labor in nearly unlimited supply.

Re:Christ on a Locomotive?!

[afidel]

Huh? The piston is a fairly crappy use of steam power and is not seen very much today. The turbine on the other hand is a very efficient way to handle steam and the Aeolipile is an example of a reaction turbine. The biggest drawback of the Aeolipile is that it is a single stage turbine, to get the most efficient transfer of power from the steam you need a multistage turbine.

Economic, meet engineering

[elpapacito]

Quoting Yeager

I always ran into walls at Sun, company politics, and that never worked out too well. When I was at Stanford there was a rule: The best engineering wins. Simple, straightforward. If your engineering is better than the other guy's, yours got the blue ribbon. Well at Sun, and at companies in general, it's different. It's the politically correct software that gets productized.

Which is recipe for disaster as technology wins 9 times out of 10. Audio compression + internet + PC are reshaping the music business kicking freeloader rentier companies away from the profits ; if the CEO CIO and whatnot were to decide the fate of technology, MP3 was certainly going to be canceled.

Obviously the abovesaid managers will complain that MP3 reduced the value of music and that Mp3 caused more unemployement, less developement of music etc etc. They are right when they say MP3 collapsed their artificial scarity profit scheme, their copyright abuse and incredible overpricing.

Imagine what cool technology is being canceled right now, because of that reasoning.

Re:Routing the past

[rakkasan]

What the average slashdotter doesn't get is this guy is one of the original alpha geeks. He deserves loads more credit. He didn't suggest ideas to a committee, he built the tools, then built the device. That takes an intimate understanding of the subject way beyond what I have for sure. He is of the generation that sent man to the moon using mostly paper and pencil math. We build on the shoulders of common men with extraordinary insights into thier craft.

Thing is - times change, I used to work with a retired IBMer who could design and build a working pc using vacuum tubes, but had difficulty loading drivers in windows. Different times, different skillsets.