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."

Re:it took him 6 months?

[NitsujTPU]

In 20 years, undergraduate computer science students will be required to write virtual machine monitors.

Right now, I have taken classes that required me to write neural networks, and perform experiments on compute clusters.

20 years ago, this was a big deal.

No, it's not still here.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in Pine Hall. I just looked in the aforementioned telephone closet, and, while there's still a chunk of thick-net on the wall, the router's gone.

Re:it took him 6 months?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article?

It was not an easy task and the guy had only 56k of ram to work in on a primptive PDP11 with no networking hardware.

It was homebrew to the core and he had to rewrite his software several times and write his own optimization code in assembly because even the best c compilers produced code that was too big.

In that 56k or ram he used buffers to handle the 3 megs per second transfer rates. Pretty damn impressive and I would assume would be impossible.

Re:No, it's not still here.

[Surt]

It's behind the locked metal panel in the upper right of the corner of the wall right of the door.

Re:I'll say it again

[tomherbst]

I think they were mapping the existing PUP into the IP address. Since PUP is two 8 bit numbers
it would map cleanly into the third and forth octets of a v4 IP address. When I was at
Xerox I also mapped IP and the PUP space, but it was in '87 and we ARP'ed (and PROBEd - thank
you hp). We did the mapping to leverage the existing addressing plan. Since he was just
doing this for Stanford he may have hardcoded the other two octets.

Xerox also had multiprotocol routers called Dicentras hand crafted at PARC. They were also
based on multibus boxes with 2901 bitslice processor "D machines". They routed PUP and XNS.
Hardware, software and ideas seems to flow around the valley pretty freely in the 80's, so I
don't know which came first. A project was started to implement IP on them, but it
was easier to just buy cisco processor boards and stick them in the dicentra chassis full
of 3COM ethernet cards; that made them useful until the 68000's ran out of gas.

tom

Re:And soon after...

[yo_tuco]

"ASCII boobs date back at least to the teletype era... I'm sure some enterprising young engineer found ways to make punchcard boobs before that."

It would be interesting to find the earliest use of ASCII images. The first general purpose teletype [wikipedia.org] goes back to around 1922. And the punch card as early as 1725 [wikipedia.org]. And if someone was transmitting ASCII boobs via punch cards or teletype, wouldn't that be considered ASCII art? These early sex-starved geeks would indeed predate the common practice of ASCII art on typewrites as early as 1948. [modernmechanix.com]

Re:it took him 6 months?

[aschlemm]

You must not have been around that long then as the development tools from the early 1980s were pretty primative by today's standards. I started working with computers in the early 1980's and we used primative line editors to write code. It was terrible as the editor forced you to relist your program over and over again. Making code changes like deletions, or insertions was very clunky and you could easly remove the wrong line or group of lines with an errant editor command.

I never saw a full screen editor until I started working on a DEC VAX system running VMS. It was the same thing with microcomputers like the Apple II or 8080 or Z80-based CP/M-80 systems. I was using a line editor until I got a copy of WordStar for CP/M-80 which gave me some full screen editing capabilites. The microcomputers were 8bit with a maximum of 64K of memory and there wasn't any memory protection. So an errant program could lockup a microcomputer very quickly.

I even managed to damage a few floppy disks in my Apple II when I was working on 6502 assembly code. My code went through and poked Apple DOS somewhere and the floppy drive unit turned on and did something bad to the floppy disk inside. The disk failed all attempts at reformating and so I just had to throw the disk out. The only fullscreen editor I ever saw for programming on the Apple II was the full screen editor in their Apple Pascal environment which was based on the UCD Pascal environment. The compiler generated pCode and was executed by a pCode interpreter written in 6502 assembly language.

the real meat of TFA

[bobbyshade]

the past is cool, but it is just that. past. what i found most interesting in TFA was what Mr. Yeager is up these days. like his new patent for a P2P net called "Peerouette-Network" and what it will be capable of. have a read . http://www.freshpatents.com/Global-community-namin g-authority-dt20060112ptan20060010251.php [freshpatents.com]

things change

[GunFodder]

I remember visiting my dad at the UCSC computer center. There was an observation window with a view into their brightly lit dinosaur pen. There were rows of computers and tape drives that looked more like appliances. People were scurrying around attending to the care and feeding of these machines.

A few years ago I went back to this same computer center. The lights were off and no one was there. There were a variety of behemoth machines in the shadows around the room that looked like they hadn't been fired up in years. There was a row of relatively tiny Sun servers running down the middle of the room that appeared to be handling the workload that previously took a room full big iron. My dad showed me one Vax 11/780 in the corner that was still being used as a mail server. But there was already a plan to decommission this last vestige of a bygone era, thanks to its enormous appetite for power.