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Nothing phenomenally new on the early days to add on top of Video "Nerds 2.0.1 excerpt about Cisco (1998)", but a few new good points:
- Cisco at one point became the largest company by market capitalization. This wore off a bit as of 2020.They used this overvalued stock in part to buy many other (often also overvalued) up and coming companies. This acquisition spree strategy was apparently not the norm at the time. rohitnair.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/cisco-history-cisco-systems-history-and-trivia-brand-history-and-trivia/ mentions they have bought more than 140 companies since, and that they call this strategy "Build, Buy And Partner"
- a big part of what Cisco did was to allow cheap local communication in-campus. At that time, the ARPANET was already up and running, but their "routers", called Interface Message Processors were very expensive at about $100,000, and to send data across the campus you had to go through them, which meant expensive bandwidth. The routers sometimes failed, and the fallback was to send students around with disks: "sneakernet". They needed new local protocols and hardware to efficiently connect different campus networks.
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- Cisco was a pioneer in having an Internet support forum. Customers could also help one another. This was fundamental in scaling support, as they grew so fast it would be impossible to hire a support team large enough without the help of the forum.
- Cisco gave out source code to some customers who would then implement protocols they cared about, and Cisco would then merge it back