威廉·伊格（William "Bill" Yeager），思科赖以起家的多协议路由器真正的发明人。
威廉·伊格简历回目录
威廉·伊格（William Yeager）(born June 16, 1940, San Francisco) is an American engineer. He is best-known for being the inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night," multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20 year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory. The code was licensed by upstart Cisco Systems in 1987 and comprised the core of the first Cisco IOS.
William YeagerHe is also known for his role in the creation of the IMAP mail protocol, and for writing the ttyftp serial line file transfer program, which was developed into the MacIntosh version of the Kermit protocol at Columbia University. He has also worked 5 years for NASA Ames Research Center and 10 years at Sun Microsystems. At Sun as the CTO of Project JXTA he filed 38 US Patents, and as Chief Scientist at Peerouette, Inc., 2 US and 2 European Union Patents. He has so far been granted 16 US Patents 4 of which are on High Performance Email Servers, and 12 on P2P and distributed computing. He is currently a founder and CTO at 4ZiGo, Inc.
He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964; his master's degree in mathematics from San Jose State University in San Jose, California, in 1966; and completed his doctoral course work at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1970. Then decided to abandon mathematics for a career in software engineering and research to the skepticism of his thesis advisor because Bill thought the future was in computing.
William (Bill) Yeager主要资料回目录
Where born, year: San Francisco, 1940
Education: Bachelor of arts in mathematics, University of California at Berkeley, 1964
Master of arts in mathematics, California
Work history: 1971-1975 — Systems programmer, NASA AMES
1975-1994 — Research staff in Stanford University’s Knowledge Systems Laboratory
1994-2004 — Sun
Present — Final stages of completing financing for start-up Peerouette
Interests/ hobbies: Fluent in French, learning Mandarin
Tennis
Collecting wine
Travel to Europe, Asia
Tidbit few people would know: After high school I attended the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y. I left the academy after 18 months, six of which were spent seeing places like Pago Pago, Samoa, Australia, Tasmania, Japan, China and the Philippines. I found a calculus book published in 1895 in the library of the USS Golden Bear of Pacific Far East Lines. I read it, liked the math and ended up at UC Berkeley, where the mascot is the Golden Bear.
思科传奇背后的故事回目录
思科公司是互联网发展史上值得记载的最重要的公司之一。 在它最辉煌的2000年里曾创下了市值5550亿美元的历史记录， 超过了包括通用电气在内的美国传统工业巨头们。 这对一个从1984年起家的小公司来说， 实在是一个神话。 不过， 如果我们同时看到美国乃至世界互联网在这段时间的迅速普及， 那么作为网络路由的主要生产者的思科的崛起就是顺理成章的事情了。
Sandy Lerner夫妇互联网（普及）除了靠个人计算机作为主要上网工具的普及外， 还要依靠另一个重要的硬件就是网络路由设备。 如果两个网络使用不同的传输协议(异种网)， 就需要一个中间设备把信息从一个网络的信息格式翻译成另一个网络的信息格式并传输过去。 除此之外， 当两台互相通讯的计算机之间存在好几条可供选择的传输网路时， 路由要决定哪一条路线最合适。 所以路由对网络的扩张起关键作用。 早在阿帕网的设计和使用中，作为路由的雏形， 接口信息处理器(Interface Message Processor， IMP)就已经设计并使用。 只不过后来的路由需要配备多种传输协议从而实现异种网之间的通讯。
八十年代初， 施乐公司掌握着当时最先进的网络技术。 它的帕洛阿尔托科研中心(Xerox Palo Alto Research Campus， PARC)研制出了许多后来成为标准化的个人计算机和网络技术。 可惜的是这些技术都没有被施乐公司商业化， 反而成就了后来居上的苹果， 微软等著名的公司。 斯坦福大学当时从帕洛阿尔托科研中心获得了一批价值不菲的以太网络装置。 于是，学校准备利用这些装置将当时分散于各个院系的独立的计算机网络连接起来。 这项工作就由在学校各个系和学院的负责计算设备维护的一部分技术服务人员承担起来。 这些技术人员中就包括后来思科的创始人列昂纳德·波萨克（Leonard Bosack）和桑德拉·勒纳（Sandy Lerner）。他们两人都在斯坦福拿的硕士学位并在谈恋爱。 波萨克当时在计算机系负责技术支持。 勒纳则在商学院负责计算机技术支持。他们感觉到一个极好商业机会来到他们面前。
William Yeager异种网的连接关键是设计一个能识别不同传输协议的路由器。 当时在斯坦福读博士生的安迪·贝托尔斯海姆(Andy Bechtolsheim)设计了一个基于UNIX的网络工作站， 波萨克等人为该工作站设计了相应的主板。 在医学院工作的威廉·伊格(William Yeager)则为这个工作站编写了路由软件。 于是这个被称为“蓝盒子” 的网络工作站就成为当时第一台能识别不同传输协议的路由器。很快，“蓝盒子”就被安装在斯坦福校园， 其他学校也与斯坦福联系希望购买这种设备。
看到了路由器的市场潜力，波萨克和勒纳向斯坦福大学的管理层正式申请，希望学校支持搞个公司来设计和生产路由器，以供斯坦福大学的使用和其他院校购买。 斯坦福当时虽然批准了贝托尔斯海姆去创立升阳(SUN)公司的请求，却以时机不成熟为理由拒绝了波萨克和勒纳的申请。尽管如此，波萨克和勒纳已经在1984年注册了思科公司。 并且他们以当时的蓝盒子技术为基础，在其他同事的协助下对路由器进行了一系列改进。
1986年，波萨克在斯坦福大学的上司，计算机系的教授，莱斯·恩尼斯特(Les Earnest) 找到他，希望他停止用在斯坦福的工作时间和资源去为思科公司工作。同时恩尼斯特通过调查发现， 波萨克已经使用斯坦福大学的资源以思科公司的名义出售给施乐公司一些网络主板。于是他要求波萨克做个决定：要么停止这种行为从而继续保留现在工作， 要么辞职。 波萨克于是正式辞职。与他一同辞职的还有电子工程系的克尔克· 劳希德(Kirk Lougheed)和其他几个同事。 这些人后来成为思科的创业功臣。
Leonard Bosack夫妇尽管波萨克等人辞职了，但涉及知识产权问题， 思科公司不得不与斯坦福大学协商，来解决路由器的关键技术的知识产权归属。 恩尼斯特起初建议学校以犯罪行为对波萨克提起诉讼。 后来，校方决定放思科公司一马， 只要求思科公司支付一笔版权费用。1987年4月， 思科公司正式付给斯坦福大学19300美元的现金并同意未来再支付15万美元的版权费和给学校，并提供相应的产品折扣，一段公案就此画上了句号。有意思的是思科公司本来希望给斯坦福大学一些公司股权做交换条件， 不过校方却以学校政策不允许回绝了。显然，斯坦福大学如果当时能够预见到十五年后，思科公司的市值会超过五千亿美元的话，相信他们也许会重新考虑这个决定是否明智。
随后, 遨游于商海的思科公司如鱼得水，以惊人的速度发展起来了。波萨克和勒纳则在1990年公司上市后，因为与董事会不和而离开了思科。思科公司这段颇不平凡的创业史就此告一段落。
神雕侠侣－Cisco Systems公司的创建者回目录
Leonard Bosack和他的前妻Sandra Lerner一起，是Cisco Systems公司的创建者。
1969年，Bosack毕业于宾夕法尼亚州的一所名叫La Salle的高中，同年进入宾州大学，并且在1973年获得学士学位。毕业后，他进入了Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)公司并参与一个和36bit系统有关的项目。1979年，Bosack离开DEC公司进入斯坦福大学并于之后的1981年获得计算机科学专业硕士学位。在那里，他遇到了他的同学Sandra Lerner并于1980年与之结婚。
Cisco Systems公司的创建者 Leonard Bosack和他当时的妻子， Sandra Lerner，被认为是为完善有史以来第一台路由器的设计做出了主要的贡献，正是路由器使得构建internet成为了可能。不过，发明第一台路由器的殊荣并不属于这对夫妇，它属于一个叫William Yeager的人，他是当时斯坦福医学中心的工程师。正是此人写出了一个名叫Internetwork Operating System (IOS)的软件来控制一种专用的计算机使之可以实现路由的功能。Bosack和他的小组接手了这个软件的源代码并完善了其中的设计思路，最终利用它造出了成功商用的路由器。
设计有史以来第一台路由器的诱因源于当时的Bosack管理着斯坦福大学计算机科学系的电脑，而他的妻子Lerner管理着远在校园另一头的商业研究所的电脑。他们之间可以利用校园局域网（campus LAN）收发Email，但他们的电脑由于分别使用不同的操作系统因而不能直接连通。于是，两人在自己的电脑上使用了一块由后来的SUN Microsystems的创始人Andy Bechtolsheim设计的网卡并使用了经过升级的IMP操作系统，在大楼之间架设网线并且使电脑之间直接相连。
在架网的过程中，Bosack和Lerner的团队不断地改进整个系统的连通性以使得它可以连接不同的网络、不同的计算机操作系统和不同的协议。很快，消息不胫而走，很多其他大学的机构开始向他们索要这种全新的改进的系统，当时，这台机器被称为“multiprotocol router”。
Bosack和Lerner夫妇意识到了这台新机器背后可能蕴藏的巨大商机，他们开始向斯坦福大学申请将这台机器以及相关技术投入正式的商业销售。由于斯坦福大学是非赢利性机构，它不能够进入一个商业投机领域，因此它理所当然地拒绝了这个要求并禁止这个小组出售这个技术。
关于这个故事还有许多有趣的有争议版本，包括斯坦福大学自己。它在之后宣布Bosack和其他人篡夺了原本属于自己的路由器设计理念并非法地投入商用。在提出诉讼之余，斯坦福大学于1987年的4月就路由器软件的license和两块电脑主板向Cisco公司收取了19300美元的现金和150000美元的版税，并且还能享有在Bosack夫妇离开之后使用Cisco公司产品的折扣，服务，以及产品的完善升级之类的特权。
1984年，Bosack和Lerner夫妇正式组建了Cisco Systems公司并且开始在他们家的客厅制造路由器。Cisco这个名字取自美国城市San Francisco，其公司Logo也来自那个著名的金门大桥。1986年，Bosack正式从斯坦福辞职。同年，Bosack和Lerner得到了Sequoia Capital公司二百五十万美金的风投，这是他们俩经历了77次在其他风投公司申请失败之后才得到的。
从1984年到1992年，Cisco以平均每年200%的速度增长，而这些增长是在几乎没有做任何广告的条件下取得的。1990年8月28日，公司的管理层解雇了Lerner。在得知这个消息后，Bosack立刻主动辞职以示对妻子的支持。他们俩也立即卖掉了属于自己的Cisco股票并获利一亿七千万美金。第二年，Bosack在华盛顿Redmond创建了自己的公司名叫XKL (http://www.xkl.com/)，他在那里工作至今。
思科创业神话的真实版本回目录
A start-up's true tale
Often-told story of Cisco's launch leaves out the drama, intrigue
BY PETE CAREY
Mercury News
Founding legends are a specialty of Silicon Valley, and none is more appealing than that of Cisco Systems: i/In the 1980s a young Stanford University couple invent the multiprotocol router and starts Cisco in their living room, using their own credit cards for financing.
Repeated for years by Cisco's marketers and the news media (including the Mercury News), the story of the couple, Leonard Bosack and Sandy K. Lerner, mirrors the Silicon Valley dream: Come up with a breakthrough, found a company and become a millionaire.
But the Cisco legend is incomplete. It omits many people who helped develop the multiprotocol router, a device critical to the early Internet. It omits a battle with Stanford that almost killed Cisco at birth over charges that the founders used technology that belonged to Stanford to start their business.
Perhaps most important, legends like Cisco's obscure the true collective nature of the innovation that built Silicon Valley long before the hype and froth of the Internet bubble. A good idea is followed by hundreds of major and minor improvements; the entrepreneur in the group forms a company around the idea, and makes still more improvements.
``One can't define who did what, because it was pretty much of a cooperative effort,'' said Nick Veizades, one of many Stanford staff members who worked on the router. ``People tried to improve certain things so they worked better, and in this way they propagated.''
But Silicon Valley legends are hard to kill. Even a Stanford Web site still credits Bosack and Lerner with developing the device ``that allowed computer networks to talk intelligently to one another'' in a description of a Cisco-endowed professorship.
Pieces of the full story have slowly emerged, beginning with an exchange of Web postings that followed a 1998 PBS documentary, ``Nerds 2.0.1,'' that gave Bosack and Lerner sole credit. Since then, several books have tried to unravel the true story. Cisco spokeswoman Jeanette Gibson now says: ``Obviously it was a team of people.'' Lerner also acknowledges the many contributors, saying in an e-mail to the Mercury News, ``The only person I'm certain had nothing to do with it is Al Gore.''
Yet the legend lives on, retold again and again.
TANGLED HISTORY
Work for university winds up at Cisco
Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by two members of Stanford's computer support staff: Len Bosack, who was in charge of the computer science department's computers, and Sandy Lerner, who managed the Graduate School of Business' computers.
Cisco was to become one of the nation's fastest growing companies by providing the networking equipment that connected the Internet. But its early history was bound up with the networking of the Stanford campus. That began informally in 1980-81 after the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center gave Stanford some of its Alto workstations and Ethernet networking boards.
The Alto was far in advance of other workstations (it would soon show Apple the way to the Macintosh), but it was the Ethernet technology that inspired Stanford staffers.
In a warren of offices under Margaret Jacks Hall and the Stanford Quad that one veteran described as ``straight out of the Hobbit,'' staff members and graduate students developed the technology to link the computer systems in Stanford's schools and departments so they could all talk to one another.
Their crowning creation was a small box that functioned as a multiprotocol router, so named because it enabled computers of varied make, with different protocols, to communicate and to access the early Internet. They called it the ``Blue Box'' for the color of its case. Inside was a collection of parts that reflected the genius of the basement beneath Margaret Jacks Hall and several other departments on campus.
The box evolved from a request by Ralph Gorin, director of computer facilities from 1979 to 1983, for a ``network extension cord,'' something that could increase the distance between networked computers. ``And it evolved,'' Gorin recalled. ``I wanted an extension cord; they gave me a multiple outlet strip.''
The box's computer board was one that a graduate student, Andy Bechtolsheim, had designed for a network workstation for engineers (he went on to found Sun Microsystems). The box contained networking boards developed by several staff members and graduate students, including Bosack.
The box's software -- a crucial component -- was written at Stanford's medical school by William Yeager, a staff research engineer.
Yeager had already written a small routing program to connect computers at the medical center with those in the computer science department. That multiprotocol network linked Alto workstations, mainframes, mini-computers and printers.
Now he was assigned to write an enhanced version for the Blue Box. The result was a program that could route several protocols including the burgeoning Internet protocol, permitting data to be exchanged among workstations, mainframe terminals, printers and servers.
The router running Yeager's software became the standard at Stanford, with about two dozen Blue Boxes scattered across campus. There was growing demand for more, from not only Stanford but other universities. The staff struggled to keep up with demand.
In 1985, Stanford undertook a more formal project to network the campus. It was to use only the new Internet protocol. That spring, Yeager recalls, two support staff members, Bosack and Kirk Lougheed, asked him for his original program so they could modify it for the new system. Bosack and Lougheed removed its ability to route non-Internet protocols, keeping its network operating system and related features and improving its Internet capabilities. Later, they added back other protocols.
Yeager said he didn't know that Bosack had recently incorporated Cisco and asked Stanford for permission to sell the Blue Box commercially. He had been denied.
Yeager, looking back, says that Bosack and Lougheed were refining the product that Cisco ultimately sold. ``They did this on Stanford time, and thus, debugged what were to be Cisco routers,'' he said.
Despite Stanford's ``no,'' by late 1985 Bosack and his wife, Lerner, were assembling routers in their living room in Atherton. According to former and current Stanford support-staff members, their design was strikingly similar to an updated Blue Box that had been sketched out in Margaret Jacks Hall during a networking group meeting.
``There was no difference'' between the Stanford router and the Cisco router, said Nick Veizades, who worked with Yeager at the medical center. ``The software changed a little bit, but not very much.''
Yet at the time, Veizades recalls, he thought Bosack's plan to sell routers was quixotic at best. ``We thought he was out of his cotton-pickin' mind to start Cisco,'' he said. ``We didn't think it was going to fly whatsoever. Those are the early things of the Internet.''
But Cisco was selling software and the hardware to run it on, something like a personal computer, that people were comfortable paying for. ``Cisco cleverly sold software that plugged into the wall, had a fan and got warm,'' Gorin said. ``People had a long history of buying things that plugged into the wall, made noises and got warm.''
By then, many improvements had been made to Yeager's software. ``The real value of the Yeager software was the basic operating system,'' Lougheed wrote years later. ``It wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it was quite usable and served as an excellent starting point.''
Yeager has watched with some unhappiness as newspapers and magazines, echoing one another, ignored his contributions and credited all the work to Bosack and Lerner.
TUG OF WAR
School, staff fight over ownership
In early 1986, someone went to Les Earnest, Bosack's supervisor in the computer science department and told him Bosack was using Stanford time and resources to help finance Cisco.
Earnest investigated and says he found that Bosack, in Cisco's name, had sold Xerox some networking boards made at Stanford expense and nine months later hadn't repaid Stanford. Bosack denied doing anything wrong, Earnest said, but by that May, he had ``enough evidence of misconduct'' to go to the dean's office. Eventually, Bosack was asked to decide whether to work at Stanford or Cisco.
Coincidentally, in the electrical engineering department, Lougheed, who had worked with Bosack on Yeager's routing software, was confronted by his boss, Steve Hansen. Hansen demanded that Lougheed return tape copies of his work on the software, saying they belonged to Stanford as ``work for hire.''
Hansen, who now is Stanford's computer security officer, says he told Lougheed to return the tapes or resign.
On July 11, Bosack and Lougheed resigned. They were joined at Cisco by three others from Stanford: Lerner, who had left Stanford long before, Greg Satz, a programmer, and Richard Troiano, who handled Cisco sales.
Bosack declined to comment for this article. Gorin, who hired him for Stanford's computer support staff and who now works for a Bosack company, said Bosack isn't interested in commenting on the Cisco story ever again.
``For Len this is ancient history, and he sees no particular reason to rehash it,'' he said.
In a book based on the PBS series ``Nerds 2.0.1,'' Sandy Lerner commented that Stanford was holding the technology ``hostage, and that's why we started the company.''
A tug of war began between Stanford's networking group and Cisco.
Cisco viewed the code that Hansen wanted as a descendant of Lougheed's work, rather than Yeager's. Looking back, Hansen acknowledges that ``software was this funny thing'' in the mid-'80s.
``Nobody understood it, that it had real value,'' Hansen said. ``It was, `I put a lot of time in on it, I worked evenings and nights.' I'm sure he felt that with all these enhancements, it was really his.''
The two sides also battled over artwork, called photomasks, used to make their almost identical networking boards. At the job shop that made the computer science department's boards, its photomasks would turn up in folders marked Cisco, according to Earnest, Veizades and a third staff member.
``They put `cisco' labels on the artwork as if it were theirs,'' Earnest said. ``Then we swiped it back.''
But Cisco had to come to terms with Stanford, because Bosack, Lougheed and the others had worked on the router as Stanford employees; at least some of their work did belong to the university.
``Cisco was trying really hard to find a way to get a license that would make them credible to buyers,'' said Bill Yundt, who supervised the 1985 networking project. ``Without it, they would have been dead. Everybody in the world who knew anything, knew this stuff had been done at Stanford.''
Yeager said Stanford's lawyers asked him to review a copy of Cisco's software. He found his own work in it.
Stanford officials in charge of licensing debated what to do. ``Cisco mess'' was the heading of one e-mail discussing the issue.
Earnest urged a lawsuit and even raised the idea of criminal charges against Bosack. He e-mailed colleagues: ``The fundamental problem is: how do you negotiate an equitable agreement with crooks?''
Yundt favored licensing the technology to Cisco, collecting royalties and buying some of its routers. ``It was debatable in the first place whether any wrongdoing had been committed,'' he said.
In the end, that's what was done. Stanford, as a non-profit, couldn't legally get into the router business, and didn't want to -- even if it did own the software.
``A university is not supposed to be in the manufacturing business,'' Gorin said, and ``a lot of people saw the advent of Cisco as a godsend.''
The head of the technology licensing office, Niels J. Reimers, outlined Stanford's alternatives and explained its decision in a March 1987 e-mail: ``1. Do nothing. 2. Go to court. 3. Try to make the best of a bad situation. None of the three are palatable; the first isn't even digestible. The second may make us feel good but would accomplish little else. So that left us with the third course of action.''
On April 15, 1987, Stanford licensed the router software and two computer boards to Cisco; the agreement allowed Stanford to use several of Cisco's groundbreaking software improvements made after Cisco's founders had left Stanford.
For the software, Cisco gave Stanford $19,300 in cash and agreed to royalties of $150,000 and product discounts. Yeager apportioned the royalties, giving his 80 percent share to his department.
Stanford was offered equity in Cisco, but the licensing office turned it down as a matter of policy.
Earnest said the irregular transactions he investigated, which he figured were worth more than $50,000, were settled later by Cisco for $7,000 in cash and two routers valued at $4,000 each. No charges or lawsuit were filed.
Lerner, who left Cisco with Bosack in 1990, said she feels uncomfortable discussing details of the negotiations. The lawsuit ``was only a threat,'' she said. ``The result was that Stanford got some money, as well as Cisco maintaining their Internet for three years. Good deal all round.''
But as negotiations drew to a close, the intense feelings of several people who had helped develop the router were summed up by Yeager's former boss, Tom Rindfleisch. ``There is so much evidence of concealment, bad faith, or worse on the part of some Cisco principals,'' he wrote to his colleagues, ``that we should not count on preserving a long-term working relationship.
``I fear the Cisco experience has done unseen damage to Stanford in the form of creating inhibitions against sharing ideas, information and developments with possible commercial value among our groups which have need to benefit from each other's work,'' he concluded.
INDEBTED
Company, school try to mend rift
With the passing years, relations between Stanford staffers and Cisco improved, and the company and its leaders -- including Cisco chairman John Morgridge and others with a Stanford connection -- have made substantial donations. But some strong feelings remain among a few.
In 1995, Morgridge gave a talk at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in which he ran through the origins of the company, relying heavily on the legend of Bosack and Lerner's role. In the back, a man stood and declared Morgridge's account ``almost entirely a fabrication.'' It was Les Earnest. He added, ``Bosack's resignation was not entirely voluntary.''
``We have been remorseful,'' said Morgridge, drawing a laugh from the audience. ``We know that we owe a considerable debt to that institution.''
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Contact Pete Carey at pcarey@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5419.
William Yeager访谈录回目录
2006年，《Router man》访问了当时已经66岁的威廉·伊格（William Yeager），他在1980年任职史丹福大学的时候，为了连接院区各个独立的计算机网络，进而创造了「多协议路由器」（Multiprotocol Router）。
The creator of the multiprotocol router reflects on the development of the device that fueled the growth of networking.
By John Dix , Network World , 03/27/2006
The creator of the multiprotocol router reflects on the development of the device that fueled the growth of networking.
William (Bill) Yeager is 66 and still gets peeved when someone trots out the Silicon Valley fable about how the founders of Cisco invented the router. He was the guy at Stanford University that made it happen. The history of Network World roughly parallels the commercialization of routing, so we tracked Yeager down for a glimpse into the scene back then.
You're credited with developing the first router while you were a staff researcher at Stanford. Tell us the tale.
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.
What kind of gear did you need to connect?
We had mainframes, of course, DEC10 Systems, a number of Xerox PARC Lisp machines, Altos file servers and printers, and over the next year or so added DEC VAXs, Texas Instruments' Explorers and Symbolic systems. All of these things had to be hooked together, because we were spread across buildings on campus, and people were tired of carrying tapes around.
I thought about this for a bit, 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.
The struggle was always a balance between how many input buffers you could have. You really had to squeeze things, because there was no disk and if you ran out of memory for input buffers you were dead in the water. So you had all of these constraints, which actually had a lot to do with how good it ended up being, because I had to do a lot of work to both assure the memory allocation algorithms would never run out of memory, as well as get things scheduled right. I spent an entire summer making sure the NOS scheduling and packet-switching algorithms were optimal.
All in all we had the basic systems put together and working in about three months, and at six months the first router was in place in Pine Hall in a telephone closet. Pine Hall was midway between the medical center and the department of computer science. It was about a 2,000 feet cable run on either side of the router.
What protocols did the box support?
Initially, the code routed Parc Universal Packet (PUP) for the Xerox PARC systems and mainframes. Late in '81 my boss said, 'IP is coming down the pipe. Figure out what you can do with it.' So I put a little IP router in, and I didn't have to worry about things like ARP [Address Resolution Protocol], because it was 3 megabit Ethernet, so your IP address was just 2 bytes, one for the network and the other for the host, and the host byte was also the [media access control] address. But we were ready by '82, when the computer science department started dropping IP in all of these VAX750s, and by 1983 the routers supported XNS - which is Xerox Network Services - CHAOSnet for the TI Explorer and Symbolics Lisp machines, and IP. And it was just about then that Stanford University started to make the big transition to 10Mbps Ethernet.
Is that roughly when you made the shift from the PDP11/05-based router to the device based on the 68000 board developed by Andy Bechtolsheim (who later went on to found Sun)?
Andy was a master's student, and that collision was fortuitous. We had heard about his board, and we talked to him and he said we could have it. We plugged that sucker into a multibus backplane, plugged in some 3Com Ethernet boards and then rattled off a few copies, and I sat down and did a full transition of the code. One of the key aspects of these routers I put together is they really could route. I had a tremendous amount of instrumentation in there. I worked very, very hard to get that right and they could really pass stuff through as fast as the hardware could move. My limitation was the bus speed, that was it. The original Bechtolsheim boards had 256KB of RAM, and that was huge at the time. To me it seemed like paradise.
Is that when the school's network started to take off?
People were skeptical at first, but by 1983 it was clear this was the way to go. Initially, just technical people were hooking up, but then the rest of the campus got wind of it and it was made official and the thing started growing like hell. I completed the serious development around '85.
What happened in the interim? A lot of tweaking and refinement?
It's endless, right? New features, functions. I did a lot of Lisp work where objects were used, and I adapted that approach in C, so a router was a class, and a specific protocol, say IP, was an instance of that class, and the NOS was multitasking. When you added another router, then you ended up putting in an instance as another task or thread. In the network I/O drivers you would look for the link-level type in the packet to determine the protocol, and everything goes into nice queues under these router threads and it all works. That's why Cisco did so well in this, because you could add more and more stuff to the [operating system], no problem. Just add another task.
Speaking of Cisco, when did they enter the picture?
In the spring of 1985 Len Bosack [who was in charge of the computer science department's computer facilities and later went on to co-found Cisco] and another guy knocked on my office door and asked if they could have access to sources for the router code. I said, what do you want to do? They said, we want to improve it, add more features. I said, well that would be great, because I have other research tasks to do, and I gave them the password and away they went. I had no idea Cisco had been founded in '84. I'd never heard of it.
So your understanding was they wanted the code for the betterment of the school network?
Right. So we had weekly meetings and they were indeed working on the sources. The decision had been made to go with pure IP routers, so they took out XNS, CHAOSnet and PUP. And ultimately when they got it going about a year later their version of my code became the official Stanford routers. Things were working well and that was my only concern. We had connectivity.
So I guess sometime in '86 I found out about Cisco. We all found out about Cisco and what Len was up to. And yeah, they were developing that code on Stanford time for Cisco. But this was not exactly bad, because other things had happened like that at Stanford before. But Stanford was deciding it was time to put its foot down. 'Guys, you develop something on Stanford's campus, we want to profit from it,' right?
Who was saying this?
This was just kind of the general tenor. So I was called into Stanford Legal and the lawyer told me to bring my sources on paper. Since [Len's partner] was in the Double E department he had the Double E sources. And I sat down, and the lawyer said, 'Will you do a comparison.' And I said, well let's start with the operating system. That's sort of the heart and soul of this. And it was identical except for changing variables names. I said, can you see this? She said, 'I'm a lawyer and I can see this is identical.'
Let's look at other things. Let's look at this network data logblock (a C structure). Well it's been broken into two pieces, big deal. Any time someone gets a chance to go over code again they refine it. It was refined, clearly, but absolutely the same stuff. Derivative. They changed and added a their new routing protocol, no big deal. If you knew networking you could do it. I only did what I had to do, because I was driven by my boss and he was driven by the department's needs. And when I stopped I stopped.
Well, then Stanford really put its foot down and Len [and his partners, including Cisco co-founder Sandy Lerner] left the university to focus on Cisco.
Did Cisco ever give you any credit, other than the $100,000 in royalties?
The way royalties work, a third goes to the school, a third goes to the department and a third goes to the inventor. I gave my third back to my department because essentially all of this stuff is born out of a great research environment.
But Cisco has always had trouble giving me credit. They had a Web page that I was very irked by. 'Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack were in love and they had to go out and invent routers so they could talk across campus.' What a joke. And I'm like one of these bulldogs, you know, I get a hold of these guys' pant's leg and I won't let go of it.
I'm sort of a persona non grata down there at Cisco. But it was fun. I was very passionate about this stuff. I'm always passionate about what I do. And I learned a lot about how corporations work and these guys were great capitalists and obviously they turned out with a great company.
So you left Stanford after 20 years and went to Sun, right?
William YeagerI left Stanford because it was getting more difficult to get grant money, so I did a bunch of consulting at Sun to make some extra money. Mostly dealing with IMAP e-mail stuff because there was a very interesting project at Sun called SPARCstation Voyager: a laptop with a fast matrix display, nice little footprint, running Solaris 2.4. Great system. One of the Voyager's special features was that it ran in disconnected mode. You could disconnect it from the network, and it would continued to function. My job was to create an IMAP server and client that worked when the client disconnected. This was tough because, at that time, IMAP2bis did not support disconnected e-mail, and I needed to modify the protocol to do this as well as support low bandwidth (IMAP can be very chatty). After one of the guys I was working with quit, his boss asked me to come save the e-mail part of the project. And I thought, I'm 53. I've been at universities too long. So I said sure.
How would you compare the academic to the commercial world?
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. There are charters and vice presidents and presidents and all of that stuff, and I would find myself embroiled in these battles with people 10 levels above me [laughs], but I just kept battling. I didn't care, because I liked doing good engineering.
So I brought in the IMAP technology, and by '96 IMAP servers I had written were everywhere at Sun. And once that was in place they decided we should do something called mission-critical mail. So I invented something called Sun Internet Mail Servers [SIMS], which is a whole different type of server. We ended up getting hundreds of thousands of in-boxes on a single server.
The four patents I have, out of the 40 I filed, are on SIMS. The rest are really in peer-to-peer, which I did a lot with as I moved through Sun, ending up as the CTO of JXTA, Sun's open source peer-to-peer project.
What was JXTA all about?
The charter was to create an open source project for the creation of peer-to-peer protocols that would yield a virtual layer on top of the TCP/IP stack. That would return end-to-end connectivity to the Internet by making the traversal of NATs and firewalls transparent, and provide host endpoints with globally unique identifiers. Another goal was to work toward peer-to-peer protocol standards. I personally pushed this forward in the IETF and that resulted in an IRTF Peer-to-Peer Research Group that I still co-chair.
Open source was new territory for Sun, and the Project JXTA group were the pioneers. We had a very tight organization and a charter to do disruptive technology, so it was a grand experiment. An engineer was two degrees of separation from the vice president and they were always available for discussions. Amazing! We received an introduction to how to do an open source project from CollabNet and they hosted Project JXTA. Initially, most of the engineering was done by Sun but then the JXTA community began to grow exponentially and great contributions came from non-Sun members.
But then a lot of things happened to the organization. JXTA was put under the product side of things, which kind of gave me the shivers. I mean, you get into product stuff, and you're in a box. You can't get out. I always managed, but just because I was irritating enough for my vice presidents that they would say, 'Go do something else.'
So in 1998 I'm talking to my vice president, and he says go do what you want. And I said I'm doing wireless. It's the next big thing. He says OK, if you believe it, go do it.
I wrote something called the iPlanet Wireless Server, which sat between IMAP e-mail on the back end, and on the other side you could go to [Wireless Application Protocol] servers or any kind of wireless device. It was presentation language stuff so, depending on the device, you put out screens for phones or whatever. It was quite cool. It ended up being probably one of their only money-making wireless projects.
Based on some of the projects I know you've been involved in, a common thread seems to be handheld devices. Do you see particular promise there?
Over the years I've developed a real interest in mobile devices, which was one of my reasons to go to Sun in the first place, to do this mobile laptop, which they ultimately end-of-lifed (in error, but they did it anyway). So I saw the power of these devices, and I saw the power of integrating these devices. You could see wireless moving in, see all of this happening. It was very clear.
I felt we ought to do something to get some decent user interfaces on these devices. That's going to be a big next step. I don't think everybody in the world's going to have a computer, and it's stupid to ask everybody to learn to type. If you can use a mobile phone there are ways around this, and that's part of what I'm working on if I can get this new company going.
What's the focus of the new company?
It's called Peerouette, and it's a new twist on peer-to-peer. I've created what's called a deterministic peer-to-peer network. That is, the peers are never down, because the peers are not your devices. The peers are in the network and hosted by ISPs. Your device just authenticates strongly with public key and gets in there. And all your content lives in the network and is shareable 24 by 7.
You drop your mobile phone in the toilet, it's done, but it's all backed up. Automatically. My colleague says 'Bill, go to this URL.' I do. An image of his mobile phone appears on my laptop. He says 'press the menu key.' I do. I'm looking at his menu. He says 'take a picture.' I do. A picture of him appears. We've really gotten into these operating systems, how they work. We can totally control mobile phones from other devices. This is great for mobile phone people doing IT. All under very strong encryption.
So it's a lot about that and a lot about giving computing back to the people. I'm very big on the garage rock band having a way to sell their stuff. So in my world, you create your community out there in what we call the Peerouette Network, you take your MP3 files, push them out there, we give you billing, give you advertising, and you can sell them for whatever price you want. We'll take maybe 10%, something like that. What we're really doing is giving the user, the wireless ISP and the content provider a fair share of all the content revenue.
That's kind of what I'm up to, if we can fund it and get it going. We are very close. Cross your fingers. The Internet will surely be a better place if we succeed.
Sounds great. Good luck with that. In closing, let's change the subject. I understand you have a wine cave. What's that?
In French a wine cellar is called a cave because originally all the wine bottles were literally stored in caves. So we have a wine cellar and keep a reasonable supply . . . about 500 bottles going back to the '80s. Always fun when you have friends over. Go down to the cave and bring out a bottle or two.
What's your favorite wine?
Pinot Noir. Without any doubt. They are the most subtly complex wines. They have a spectrum of flavors that show a taste of the earth.
来源：http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2006/anniversary/032706-routerman.html
背景文章阅读：为什么了解真相很重要回目录
Valley of the Nerds: Who Really Invented the Multiprotocol Router, and Why Should We Care?
By Robert X. Cringely
bob@cringely.com
While the computer business may appear to run on gray matter, money and Jolt Cola, the real fuel is ego. As I wrote years ago, they do it to impress their friends. This has become even more clear to me following the airing of "Nerds 2.01: A Brief History of the Internet" as the experts, pundits and wrongfully accused have emerged to point out my mistakes.
They are a kindly lot, these critics, generally eager just to have their particular part of the story better or more accurately told. I've been this route before, only now I am older and better able to appreciate the position of the wronged engineer. In my book Accidental Empires, for example, I gave less than complete credit to Jef Raskin, head of the original Macintosh project at Apple. It seemed to me at the time that Jef had conceived of a low-cost machine called the Macintosh, but that most of the important work was done after Raskin's departure. Well, I was wrong. Sure, the Macintosh of Steve Jobs was very different, but in addition to the name, Raskin had hired most of the core Macintosh technical team and shepherded QuickDraw, the Mac's imaging model. This was nontrivial stuff and I owe Jef greater credit than I gave him at the time. Sorry.
This time around I stand corrected on a couple fronts. First, Tim Berners-Lee checked-in to say I had it wrong when I claimed Mosaic was the first graphical browser. I'll let Tim tell it:
"I wrote the first GUI browser, and called it "WorldWideWeb" for NeXTStep. (I much later renamed the application Nexus to avoid confusion between the first client and the abstract space itself.) Pei Wei, a student at Stanford, wrote "ViolaWWW" for UNIX; some students at Helsinki University of Technology wrote "Erwise" for UNIX; and Tony Johnson of SLAC wrote "Midas" for UNIX. All these happened before Marc (Andreessen) had heard of the Web. Marc was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA, Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser from scratch. As they did, Tom Bruce was writing "Cello" for the PC which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.
"Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browser that was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inline images working — to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts and colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows. Most importantly, he followed up his and Eric's coding with very fast 24 hour customer support, really addressing what it took to make the app easy and natural to use, and trivial to install. Other apps had other things going for them. Viola, for example, was more advanced in many ways, with downloaded applets and animations way back then — very like HotJava.
"Marc marketed Mosaic hard on the net, and NCSA hard elsewhere, trying hard to brand the WWW and "Mosaic": "I saw it on Mosaic" etc. When Netscape started they of course capitalized on Mosaic as you know - and the myth that Mosaic was the first GUI browser was convenient."
Okay, now everyone knows the truth about graphical Web browsers. I'm sorry, Tim, for missing your contribution and the contributions of so many others. But if you think this is bad, imagine how they would have handled it on "Dateline."
The second technical error is harder to explain, both because it lies even deeper in the technology and because there is still some dispute about who did what to whom. The issue at hand is who actually invented the multiprotocol router. "Nerds 2.01" clearly credits Cisco Systems founder Len Bosack, while another ex-Stanford academic, Bill Yeager, claims he's the man. To his credit, Bill (who now works for Sun Microsystems) has some Stanford documents that certainly credit him as the "principal inventor."
Here is Bill Yeager's third-person version of his story:
"Before Sun was formed at Stanford University, efforts were already underway across campus in the medical school to develop the multiple protocol routers that Cisco Systems licensed in 1986 from the Stanford University Office of Technology Licensing. Around Christmas of 1979 Xerox gifted ethernet technology to Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. Ethernet-based local area networks were immediately installed in the Stanford medical school, and the department of computer science. This led to the need for what became known as "router technology". These were to interconnect not only different Ethernet segments, but also to interconnect Ethernet local area networks and the national Internet (Internet protocols were rolled out in 1982 to replace the ARPANET).
"A Stanford researcher, Bill Yeager, who worked for the SUMEX-AIM resource, located in the Medical School, was assigned the task to produce the router technology. By June, 1980, PDP11/05 based router was in place which connected the medical school and department of computer science. By 1981 Yeager developed a unique network operating system, which would be the basis for the MC68xxx version of the code. This was completed later that year, and was ultimately licensed by Cisco Systems.
"In 1983, the Sumex-aim router code was accepted as the Stanford standard. It both routed and provided network services for Parc Universal Packets (PUP), the Internet Protocol (IP), the Xerox Network Services protocol (XNS), and interconnected the Stanford Local Area Network. Access to the Internet was managed by a PDP11 running MIT router software. This used IMP technology to connect to the Internet, and was supported by Jeff Mogul, a Ph. D. student in computer science.
"In 1985, Len Bosack and Kirk Lougheed were given access to Bill Yeager's source code by Yeager. By this time the code was fully functional, additionally routing the MIT CHAOSnet protocol, and providing a host of services, among which was auto-configuration, and remote network booting with the BOOTP protocol. Lougheed continued its development in the department of electrical engineering, and was an initial employee of Cisco Systems.
"Although Yeager was the author of this code, he did not work in a vacuum. Stanford University is a laboratory where the free exchange of ideas among researchers is a day-to-day experience. Significant early contributions to the Stanford networking technology were made by three graduate students, Jeff Mogul, Bill Nowicki, and Benjy Levy. Mogul and Nowicki were there from the beginning, writing prototype router and EtherTIP code in CSD, and doing what was required to install network services on the early UNIX vax systems.
"In the final royalty agreement that Cisco Systems signed, Yeager granted 15 percent of these royalties to the department of computer science for the contributions Levy made to the EtherTIP portion of the same code base that Yeager developed."
So Bill Yeager was right there in the thick of router development, there is no doubt. But there are others who remember the story slightly differently and in even more detail. Here is Kirk Lougheed's version. Kirk, an original Cisco employee, is still at that company:
"I consider the standard story of Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner developing networking and routing at Stanford as something akin to a sound bite. It sounds good, but hides a lot of complexity. As anyone who has been around Silicon Valley for a while knows, there a lot of people besides the founders who are critical in the creation of a company. However, in the story-telling business, a complex story is a snoozer, so lots of details — and people — get dropped from the story. Good marketing people and other myth makers understand this; Cisco's early marketing people are largely responsible for the standard Len and Sandy story.
"I do not believe that Bill Yeager appreciates the story telling as practiced by Silicon Valley companies, marketeers, and journalists. There are many unsung heroes. He has not been singled out.
"The concept of a router (in those days called a gateway) as a packet switching device that operated at the network layer, arose from the same ferment as TCP/IP. Indeed, you had to invent a network layer (IP) before you could think of switching it. I believe there was a BBN document from the middle 1970s that described how you would build a router, although I have never actually seen it.
"At the same time as TCP/IP was being developed, similar protocol suites were being developed at MIT (the Chaosnet protocols) and Xerox PARC (the PUP or Parc Universal Packet protocol). Both protocols ran over LANs of limited extent, PUP over Xerox's 3MB Ethernet and Chaosnet over something similar. Both PUP and Chaosnet were designed so they could be switched by routers.
"Around 1979 or 1980, Xerox donated some Altos and 3MB Ethernet equipment to Stanford. The Stanford campus is rather spread out, so right away there was the problem of linking the various islands of Altos and other machines. People first tried the cheap solution of using hardware repeaters. Not very satisfactory. Bridges and their attendant broadcast storms were not a lot better. So it was on to routers.
"Bill Yeager implemented a router for PUP protocols using the SUN-1 processor card, 3MB Ethernet cards of Xerox design, and a Multibus backplane. From looking at the comments in the early sources, he did this in the summer of 1982 and he used as his model the sources for the PDP-11 based router used at Xerox PARC. The routing protocol was PUP Gwinfo as defined by Xerox PARC.
"Yes, Xerox came THAT close to the router market.
"For the multiprotocol story, you need to understand the PUP addresses are 16 bits long and IP addresses are 32 bits long. PUP addresses can fit inside IP addresses. When Stanford started running IP on its Ethernets, the local convention was for a host to have both PUP and IP addresses and to embed its PUP address within its IP address. Thus when an IP packet arrived at the router, the software would look at the IP address, extract the PUP address, make a routing decision based on the PUP routing table, and then send the IP packet on its way.
"I think this is what Bill means by multiprotocol routing.
"There is more to the story.
"Bill went on to implement support for terminal lines; the result was called a EtherTip, or Ethernet Terminal Interface Processor, inspired by the TIPs that sat on the ARPAnet. The idea was to have a pool of terminals that could be connected over the network to any computer on the network. Again, PUP protocols were used to connect the Tip to the computer.
"I came into the picture in 1985. I had been doing a lot of IP and PUP work on the DECsystem-20s at Stanford. Since DEC had discontinued that product line, I was looking for other things to do. The Tip software struck my fancy, so I got a copy and started improving it. I wasn't interested in the router portion of the software, so I chopped that part out and concentrated on adding real TCP/IP support.
"Since Bill's original software had to be custom compiled for each router or tip, other people (Benjy Levy, Philip Almquist) had taken copies of the software and were making modifications for their local environments at Stanford. My goal was to generalize the software so that one binary could run on all Tips. Site specific parameters would be handled through configuration files downloaded from the network. In the process I realized that I wasn't very far away from a router, so I added the PUP switching code back in and wrote some new IP switching code. The routing decisions were still based on a PUP routing table.
"When we (Len, Sandy, Greg Satz, Richard Troiano, and I) left Stanford in July of 1986, we weren't sure whether we were going to be selling terminal servers (Tips) or routers. The software would do either. We did know, however, that there was no market for PUP, so we abandoned PUP support and emphasized TCP/IP, implementing Cisco's IGRP to replace the PUP Gwinfo for making routing decisions. The market pretty quickly told us it was more interested in routers than terminal servers.
"One of our very valuable early customers, Chuck Hedrick of Rutgers University, was the person who drove us in the direction of multiprotocol routers. Chuck was one of our few source licensees. He also had a lot of machines that used the DECnet networking protocol. As a weekend hack (or so it seemed), he implemented DECnet routing in the Cisco software and gave us the source with the stipulation that we not charge extra for it. The DECnet and IP support were totally independent in that they didn't share a routing protocol. This "ships in the night" approach as it is called, is how multiprotocol routing is done these days.
"As for Bill's version (of the story), I have no major quarrels with it. Jeff Mogul and Bill Nowicki were certainly major players in the networking scene at Stanford in the early to mid 80s. There were a lot of people involved in working on the software. There's plenty of room under the sun for all of us.
"The real value of the Yeager software was the basic operating system. It wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it was quite usable and served as an excellent starting point. The PUP routing wasn't of commercial interest. His minimal IP support was tossed out and rewritten as a full stack that included TCP support. XNS was also tossed out and when it reappeared years later, it was a "from scratch" effort by Greg Satz. And yes, Chuck Hedrick likely used some of Bill's original code at Rutgers. Hedrick also wanted a commercial source for the hardware and for software support. That is what Cisco provided, since no other company seemed interested. My memory is that Hedrick implemented the DECnet support in the Cisco router code.
"There is one other person who should be mentioned in a story about the first multiprotocol router. The Chaosnet protocol developed at MIT was, like PUP and IP, a routable protocol. MIT implemented their Chaosnet routers on PDP-11's and when IP came along, routed IP and Chaosnet together, probably much like we did at Stanford. I believe the author of that software was Noel Chiappa. It was Noel who took the MIT software to Proteon and persuaded them to build the Proteon routers that were Cisco's competition in the early years. Proteon also stressed IP and ended up implementing DECnet."
If you are still with me, it looks like Kirk Lougheed confirms that the Len and Sandy story is apocryphal, and that Bill Yeager made a major contribution.
So let's credit Bill Yeager with writing the first multiprotocol router, Len Bosack for understanding that the technology developed at Stanford had commercial possibilities, and Sandy Lerner for having the drive to create Cisco Systems.
Now I need a drink.
