How the Multi-protocol Router Came to Be
As part of NetworkWorld’s 20th Anniversary celebration, they have featured an interview the the father of multi-protocol routing, William (Bill) Yeager. For those of you who don’t know him, Mr. Bill Yeager was the researcher at Stanford credited with the invention of the router. It is appropriate that we discuss the evolution of the multi-protocol router whose existence made it possible to start-up the Philippine Internet (which celebrated its anniversary yesterday). It all began …
… 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.
… and I said, well really what you need is an operating system. So while the cables were being pulled and tested, I developed a network operating system [NOS] and routing code [to run on a] DEC PDP11/05. But the Alan Snyder Portable C compiler generated too much code. So I had to go into the compiler and improve the code generators. And that wasn’t even good enough. So then I had to write an optimizer for PDP11/05 assembler so I could reduce the code by about 30%. This was major engineering, because you had your hands into everything. It’s important to remember the PDP11/05 only had 56KB of user memory, and was diskless.
Looks like a lot of work just to connect a bunch of file servers and mainframes. Of course, in those days, they didn’t have any technology to do that. Today, we take these pleasures for granted.
Here are additional interesting stories from this anniversay series by NetworkWorld:
- 20 people who changed the industry. This article features Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner who were the two (2) Stanford folk who exploited the invention of the router to form Cisco Systems. Desh Deshpande who started Cascade Communications and introducted Frame Relay. A young engineer at Xerox PARC, Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet and started a company called 3Com. Ray Noorda, who at the helm of Novell, made the LAN a requisite component in every office in America. Radia Perlman for the spanning tree algorithm that made route convergence faster. Yakov Rekhter, the father of the Border Gateway Protocol, who founded Juniper Systems. Mark Andreessen, the father of the web browser. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web. Vinton Cerf, the father of the Internet, who is now with Google. Jon Postel, the promoter of Internet standardization. Laurie Bride, the mother of what later came to become ISO-OSI. Microsoft’s Bill Gates. IBM’s Lou Gersner. SUN’s Scott McNealy who said the “network is the computer”. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. And a few others.
- 20 network-changing products in 20 years. The expected tools by the likes Cisco, Juniper, Motorola, Novell, Netscape, Microsoft and Checkpoint. But, where is 3Com? It even includes strange entries like Lotus Notes, Software Tool and Die. It also pays tribute to the role of Open Source in the evolution of the Network. In particular, it mentions Sendmail (but, it should probably also mention Apache). It also adds some tools by newer companies such as Google, Napster and Skype.
Happy Anniversary NetworkWorld and nice articles!
April 2nd, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Re: Laurie Bride, the father of what later came to become ISO-OSI.
Your extract is slightly inaccurate. A large number of very smart people lent their expertise to the creation the the OSI reference model and the protocol specifications that came out of that effort. All I did (along with a number of other ‘user’ companies) was champion the use of network standards in order to achieve our vision: a global network capable of connecting all intelligent devices.
In addtion, I happen to be a female.
April 2nd, 2006 at 11:07 pm
My sincerest apologies for the unexpected change in gender. I am honored that you have taken the time to make this correction in my blog entry.
Standardization champions, as well as implementors, all deserve to get credit for this endeavor. However, I also personally feel that your getting mentioned in this NetworkWorld article brings honor to all these people. We have seen a lot of top 10 influential people in networking lists. Rarely, do I see ISO-OSI mentioned. Maybe they can’t credit the entire team. But, at least, they can start with one.