CISCO SYSTEMS

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Company background

Cisco was founded in late 1984 by two computer specialists at Stanford University, Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack, who commercialised the router — a device developed at Stanford which determines the optimal path along which traffic on a computer network should be forwarded. Lerner and Bosack married and led Cisco until its public stock offering in 1990. They were then driven out by the management team hired by their financial backers, led by CEO John Morgridge.

Cisco was a one-product company making nothing but routers until 1993, when Boeing decided to develop a network using switches from Crescendo ...