The Origin of Cisco Systems
8 comments
·August 4, 2025jeffrallen
In case people are suspicious/wondering about this story, it is credible to me. I worked with Bill Yundt and he told the story back in 1996. I've also seen the absolute lowest layers of Cisco IOS for 68000's and it certainly appears to come from that era of computing. One especially surprising and interesting thing to me is that it uses cooperative multitasking, not preemptive. This is how systems were written in those days, based on the limitations of early microprocessors. (At the same time in the industry, protected mode multiprocessing existed. But it was in big iron, controlled by IBM, Cray, Unisys and CDC. And those are all of the has-beens now: because technologies like microprocessors, even with their limitations, took over the industry.)
burnte
I still remember when preemptive multitasking became big in the X86 world in the late 80s/early 90s. It was a real sea change in OS stability. DESQView was fantastic but real preemptive multitasking was amazing. It was why I stayed on OS/2 until 1996 or 1997.
rkagerer
I still like it to this day for microcontroller projects.
It's not that difficult to write code that iterates in chunks and yields now and then. Of course you want to avoid non-finite I/O calls (make use of timeout parameters where available).
Things that need low latency (eg. counting encoder ticks) are still interrupt driven (or handled by dedicated peripherals).
null
owenthejumper
Yet another example of how government research drives modern innovation, and how the latest assault on it by the Trump administration will wipe out decades of innovation in the US
themafia
The irony is that the thing the government was trying to fund, use of AI in medicine, was almost entirely unrealized by this project.
It's also apparent that Xerox's involvement and willingness to share it's new inventions in Ethernet with a University eager to form the early Internet played a huge part in driving this outcome.
It seems almost completely incidental that we got an early implementation of a protocol router out of this. The government certainly wasn't trying to create one and I'm sure if they had actually involved themselves in that effort we would have gotten something far worse and far more costly.
Since the administration wasn't capable and didn't create the innovation in the first place you probably don't need to worry about later administrations removing it.
Similar to this, RetroBytes (the Youtube channel) did a video on the origin of Cisco recently which is worth a listen at 2x https://youtu.be/NXTdwzjiW7E?si=bCVpmEkyf1UUCfyR