An Interview With The Router Man 94
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."
And soon after... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And soon after... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:And soon after... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:And soon after... (Score:3, Funny)
ASCII didn't become a standard untill 1967. And art created earlier than that would by "teletype art" or "punchcard art", not ASCII art.
Re:And soon after... (Score:5, Funny)
Where else would you see people nitpicking over etymology during a discussion about drawing boobies with a computer?
Re:And soon after... (Score:2)
Re:And soon after... (Score:1)
(Heh, boobies.) (.)(.)
Angela (Score:1)
Among the first women you could fax to a friend.
Angela ASCII [textfiles.com]
Mr. Router (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Mr. Router (Score:2)
Bill: How could you do this to me Len? If there was any justice in the world, it would be my picture on a bunch of crappy investor guides!
Sandy: Len, is what this man saying true?
Len: Who can say, baby? Ideas were getting thrown around, he may have come up with the source code, but I'm the one who came up with the idea to charge $15k a pop for it!
Re:Mr. Router (Score:1)
Holy Shit (Score:5, Funny)
Now I feel like an ass.
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:2)
You are belittling him. (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy's vastly underappreciated.
Christ on a Locomotive?! (Score:5, Informative)
I saw Heron of Alexandria [wikipedia.org] on Discovery a while back. He was quite the mechanical engineer, apparently. One of his inventions, called an "aeolipile", pictured in the Wikipedia article, is the first recorded steam engine. The upshot is that he invented it sometime between 150 BC to 0 AD.
Quoth that article:
the first recorded steam engine, (known as Hero's Engine) which was created almost two millennia before the industrial revolution, which was powered by steam engines. Apparently Hero's steam engine was taken to be no more than a toy, and thus its full potential not realized for quite some time.
My point is that, just because something seems inevitable doesn't mean that it is. People miss the obvious all the time, and due to the most incredibly mundane reasons. If not for inexplicable lack of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative and inventive guy, the industrial revolution could conceivable started in Greece around the time of Christ.
It took almost 2000 years before it was obvious to someone else. Inevitable? Maybe. But it might have been your grandkids' grandkids who created the internet, if this guy hadn't hit the right set of circumstances.
Re:Christ on a Locomotive?! (Score:2)
Re:Christ on a Locomotive?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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,
Re:Christ on a Locomotive?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:5, Insightful)
No legacy (Score:2, Funny)
He didn't have any legacy code to contend with! (only half kidding).
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:it took him 6 months? (Score:2)
Well, obviously it wasn't imposisble. But of course you size your system so this event is relatively rare. Which in the day meant spending beaucoup bucks. If you remember hardware prices in the late 70s early 80s, the memory for the PDP-11 series in the mid 70s was something like four grand for an 8K board, in today's dollars over $10,000. The base PDP-11/05 unit with 8K or RAAM was about $6500, or well over $16,000 in t
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:2)
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:2)
You forgot - "you insensitive clod!"
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:2)
Hmm. So on that basis, I suppose that... say... television couldn't be called an invention, since two men came up with competing technologies independently... I mean, if one failed the other was bound to have done it "in short order".
That's a pity, because it's exactly what you
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:1)
Yeah, it wasn't until MS-DOS 5.0 that PCs came with a decent editor - anyone who ever had to use edlin to fix their autoexec.bat file can attest to just how much better the DOS 5 editor was...
I recently went back and fired up an old copy of Borland Turbo Pascal - the version I used in high school for my science fair experiments. It's actually painful to use those old tools nowadays - moder
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:2)
Re:it took him 6 months? (Score:2)
Re:Things have come so far. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Things have come so far. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Things have come so far. (Score:3, Informative)
Well take it from a networking 4 th year Phd. your description of layering and encapsulation is totally wrong. I don't blame you, I blame the ignorant mod who gave you +1.
TCP/IP segment-> ethernet frame or TCP/IP segment-> ATM -> SONET (perhaps) or TCP/IP->MPLS
there is no need to encapsulate ethernet frame in ATM, since in the case of IP traffic both A
Re:Things have come so far. (Score:2)
TCP/UDP Segment > IP Packet > Ethernet Frame/ATM Cell > physical wire
Or... Some People Feel Bad (Score:1)
Re:Or... Some People Feel Bad (Score:1)
Re:Or... Some People Feel Bad (Score:1)
Any Person Studying This Needs Desperate Psychotherapy.
Re:Things have come so far. (Score:1)
True, but since when has lack of need prevented new networking technologies from being invented? Try googling "ethernet over ATM".
I don't blame you, from the perspective of 2006 who'd'a thunk that somebody would actually do that? Hopefully your dissertation defense won't hinge on a detailed knowledge of misbegotten networking technologies.
Re:Things have come so far. (Score:1)
Re:Things have come so far. (Score:3, Informative)
The application data is packaged into the 1472-byte payload of a TCP/IP packet. That TCP/IP packet is handed off to the network interface adapter. For this example lets assume it's an Ethernet nic. The Ethernet nic (its driver or the actual ASIC on a fancy server nic) encapsulates the TCP/IP packet and stuffs it in the 1500-byte payload of an Ethernet frame (again we're glossing over the possibility of jumbo frames). Lets gloss
No, it's not still here. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No, it's not still here. (Score:2)
Re:No, it's not still here. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No, it's not still here. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No, it's not still here. (Score:2)
things change (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I'll say it again (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I'll say it again (Score:4, Informative)
The protocol version number is probably different now. The hardware didn't care about the protocol on top. I worked on converting a system from 3MBit to the new 10MBit ethernet in 1980 but I never knew or cared about IP addresses.
Re:I'll say it again (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'll say it again (Score:2, Informative)
When TCP/IP was added, the 32-bit value was formed as 36.nnn.0.hhh where nnn was the Pup net address and hhh was the Pup host address.
Re:I'll say it again (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:I'll say it again (Score:2)
Thanks for the additional info -- I was pretty sure that I was missing something major here.
Routing the past (Score:2, Informative)
By the way, the whole issue is one that ever
Re:Routing the past (Score:2, Insightful)
Thing is - times change, I used to work with a r
Re:Routing the past (Score:2)
flight sim (Score:2)
Re:flight sim (Score:2)
and, i stand corrected.
cheers
Re:flight sim (Score:1)
the real meat of TFA (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow, all that (Score:2)
Economic, meet engineering (Score:2, Insightful)
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 mu
Was I the only one? (Score:1)
Too bad cisco wasn't really the first ... (Score:1)