> I asked Len why he wanted my source code, and he told me that facilities wanted to take over the router/EtherTIP’s development because I couldn’t dedicate myself to full-time support of the system I had invented and developed with help from Mike and Benjy over the past five years. This request seemed reasonable to me, so I gave him the access he requested and thanked him for his willingness to maintain and improve the software. I didn’t know that Len and Sandy Lerner had incorporated Cisco Systems a year earlier or that Len might have had an ulterior motive: to do a rewrite and then copyright the sources as Cisco Systems’ intellectual property.
> I learned about Cisco a year later when I was called into Stanford’s legal department and told to bring a hard copy of my sources. Needless to say, I was a little nervous. Upon arrival, I was greeted by Stanford lawyer Iris Brest, who explained Cisco’s existence and Len, Sandy, and Kirk’s involvement. She then asked me to compare the Sumex-AIM sources with the EE sources that Kirk had written and tell her if I thought the work was derivative. Most of the EE sources could best have been described as plagiarized or paraphrased: variable names were changed, subroutines were renamed, and large data structures were broken into smaller ones, but identical parts abounded throughout the code. Kirk had added new features and removed others, but the “derivation” was obvious even to Iris who, from what I could tell, didn’t have a technical background. She thanked me, kept my sources, and sent me on my way.
> Just to be clear, I didn’t object to the formation of Cisco Systems or its use of the code I had invented — in fact, I was pleased that work of which I was extremely proud could be used in this manner. However, I did object to the theft of intellectual property implicit in Cisco’s copyright on the sources.
But it was kind of wild at that point there were still company mailing lists where these old heads would argue about iOS internals and flame each other in front of the whole company.
We still had a non-web bug tracking system while I was there. It was an interesting era! The product I worked on did have a web interface as essentially its only UI. We used Java, at some point we used MS Visual J++, and this was before JSPs existed. We used some proprietary templating engine to generate HTML.
As for his British accent, I find him understandable at 2x speed, but there are many others I can only listen to at 1.5x
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).
The 68k lacked the ability to resume with full state intact after a bus fault, which made an off-chip MMU painful (but there was one - the MC68451[1]), but this doesn't affect the ability to do pre-emptive multitasking at all.
AmigaOS famously did have preemptive multitasking - we used it to mock PC and Mac users with for years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68451 Note that to do full virtual memory with a 68k, Motorola proposed using a second 68k to handle page faults due to a design flaw:
https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/correcting-errors-by-dupli...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagiC
and
What it did not have was memory protection or virtual memory. You do need an MMU for those.
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.
As the article starts, that's not how Cisco, and by extension a lot of Cisco employees, tell it. To a whole lot of people, Trump is just clearing out lazy hangers on who are preventing real innovation.
Cisco's story is two people working alone in their garage creating IP routing.
this, too, mentions Yeager as the initial developer, and that CISCO licensed and enhanced his work from Stanford.