the "history" of the Internet/Web

lines was was things in All right, let's review the history here. cisco Systems[1] was incorporated in 1984 by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, the directors respectively of the Computer Science Department Computer Facility and the Graduate School of Business Computer Facility of Stanford University; their first two employees were Kirk Lougheed, systems manager for the Electrical Engineering Department Computer Facility, and Richard Troiano, a programmer at GSB. What were their products? The MEIS (Massbus-Ethernet Interface Subsystem), a 3Mbit Ethernet for the DECSYSTEM-20 (for which Digital would not produce an Ethernet until 1988), a TCP/IP router based on SUN-1 cards in a VME chassis, and a terminal interface processor (TIP) based on the same hardware. Who were their target market? Anyone intending to build an internet linking two or more Ethernet-based local-area networks, a topology demonstrated at Xerox PARC (where Ethernet was invented) using another internetworking protocol suite called PUP (PARC Universal Packets).[2] They did this because they saw a time when the Internet would be available to any business, not just those under contract to the US Department of Defense or the US Department of Energy, and they wanted to be in place to take advantage of that with an already deployed technology. So the capabilities of the 2501 (which, if I remember correctly, originated as a product from Catalyst, a smaller competitor which cisco bought out around 1992 while I was working for them) are irrelevant to what cisco gear could do with respect to the Internet. [1] The original spelling even had a leading apostrophe: 'cisco Systems. The first part of the name is an abbreviation of "San Francisco". (Personal communication from Sandy Lerner) [2] In point of fact, the cisco router was capable of doing PUP as well as TCP/IP.