history of cisco

                     1984–1995: early years

Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined by Erich Drafahl, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner briefly moved on to direct computer services at Schlumberger, but returned full time to Cisco in 1987.[citation needed] The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name, San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on using the lower case "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's first product, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally written some years before by William Yeager, another Stanford employee who later joined Sun Microsystems.[7] The company's first CEO was Bill Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988.[8] In 1988, John Morgridge was appointed CEO.

On February 16, 1990, Cisco Systems went public (with a market capitalization of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. On August 28, 1990, Lerner was fired; upon hearing the news, her husband Bosack resigned in protest. The couple walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was committed to their own charity.[9]

Although Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell dedicated network nodes,[10] it was one of the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols.[11] Classical, CPU-based architecture of early Cisco devices coupled with flexibility of operating system IOS allowed for keeping up with evolving technology needs by means of frequent software upgrades. Some popular models of that time (such as Cisco 2500) managed to stay in production for almost a decade virtually unchanged - a rare sight in high-tech industry. Although Cisco was strongly rooted in the enterprise environment, the company was quick to capture the emerging service provider environment, entering SP market with new, high-capacity product lines such as Cisco 7000 and Cisco 7500.

Between 1992 and 1994, Cisco also acquired several companies in Ethernet switching, most notably Kalpana, Grand Junction and Crescendo Communications which together formed the Catalyst business unit. At the time, the company envisioned layer 3 routing and layer 2 (Ethernet, Token Ring) switching as complementary functions of different intelligence and architecture – the former was slow and complex, the latter was fast but simple. This philosophy dominated the company's product lines throughout 1990s.


In 1995, John Morgridge was succeeded by John Chambers.