Network Systems history

During the late 1980’s, however, the population of Internet users and network constituents expanded internationally and began to include commercial facilities.

In 1980-81, two other networking projects, BITNET and CSNET, were initiated.

TCP/IP was adopted as a defense standard three years earlier in 1980.

Starting in the early 1980’s and continuing to this day, the Internet grew beyond its primarily research roots to include both a broad user community and increased commercial activity.

At its official 1983 launch, the Internet had been a modest experimental network of networks owned by the United States government.

The Internet Activities Board (IAB) was created in 1983 to guide the evolution of the TCP/IP Protocol Suite and to provide research advice to the Internet community.

In 1983, when Barry Leiner took over management of the Internet research program at DARPA, he and Clark recognized that the continuing growth of the Internet community demanded a restructuring of the coordination mechanisms.

The open Ethernet standard took another five years, and was standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3.

When they met in San Francisco in 1989, there was a lot of activity, plus some key words emerging - connectivity and interoperability. It was about 1984 that the first bulletin boards using the IBM (Bill Gates/Microsoft) operating system and Apple operating systems began to be used.

In 1985, recognizing this lack of information availability and appropriate training, Dan Lynch in cooperation with the IAB arranged to hold a three day workshop for ALL vendors to come learn about how TCP/IP worked and what it still could not do well.

Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people. Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications.

1986: Company ships its first product, a router for the TCP/IP protocol suite.

In 1987 it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way.

In 1988, the company began to target its internetworking routers at mainstream corporations with geographically dispersed branches that used different networks.

1988: Donald T. Valentine, a venture capitalist, gains control of the company; John Morgridge is named president and CEO.

When they met in San Francisco in 1989, there was a lot of activity, plus some key words emerging - connectivity and interoperability.

By 1989 many of the new community networks had joined the Electronic Networkers Association, which preceded the Internet Society as the association for network builders.

By 1989 ARPANet had disappeared, but the Information Superhighway was just around the corner.

During the course of its evolution, particularly after 1989, the Internet system began to integrate support for other protocol suites into its basic networking fabric.

DEC and Xerox will also begin commercializing their own proprietary networks, DECNET and XNS. At it’s peak around 1990, IBM’s SNA will quietly carry most of the world's networking traffic.

First Web browser-editor, 1990

1990: Company goes public; Lerner is fired and Bosack quits.

Chambers, who had previous stints at IBM and Wang Laboratories before joining Cisco in 1991, stepped up the company's acquisition pace to keep ahead of its rivals and to fill in gaps in its product line, aiming to provide one-stop networking shopping to its customers.

Olivetti of Italy agreed to market Cisco's products under a value-added reseller agreement late in 1992.

In November 1993 NSC acquired the Boston-based Bytex Corp., a developer and manufacturer of WAN and LAN network switching system products including FDDI, Token Ring, and Ethernet adapters and switches.

But with Gopher, the Web also gets a major lucky break: the University of Minnesota begins charging for Gopher server licenses in 1993, literally the same spring the Web becomes officially public domain – and free.

In 1994, Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) founds the CommerceNet consortium to encourage Web commerce, and demonstrates secure credit-card transactions that same year.

Also in 1994, Vice-President Al Gore supports a prominent White House Web site, as well as encouraging funding of W3C in the United States

In 1994, a National Research Council report, again chaired by Kleinrock (and with Kahn and Clark as members again), Entitled “Realizing The Information Future: The Internet and Beyond” was released.

1994: Revenues exceed $1 billion for the first time.

NSF’s privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the NSFNET Backbone.

Initially based in Saint Paul, Minnesota the company moved to Brooklyn Park, Minnesota after delivering their first high-speed networking computers to the NSA. It merged with Storage Technology Corporation on September 20, 1995.

The first businesses to earn substantial profits on the Web are pornography and gambling sites, by 1995.

Astounding Growth Under John Chambers Starting in 1995

1996: Company acquires StrataCom, Inc., maker of switching equipment, for $4.67 billion.

Jon Postel served as Director of the Computer Networks Division of the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California until his untimely death October 16, 1998.

1998: Cisco's market capitalization passes the $100 billion mark.

Blogger, launched in 1999

During 1999 Cisco also acquired GeoTel Communications Corp., a maker of software for routing telephone calls, for about $1.9 billion.

In early 2000, business fundamentals reassert themselves.

Rather than slowing it down, Chambers planned to increase the company's acquisition pace, with the addition of as many as 25 companies during 2000.

2000: Company's market capitalization reaches $450 billion.

Storage Technology Corporation was purchased by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 2005.