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1989

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) napkin

innovation

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) napkin

1989

Array

Cisco’s Kirk Lougheed and IBM’s Yakov Rekhter sketch out BGP over lunch at a 1989 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting. Their networking innovation, still an essential routing protocol for the global Internet, is as integral today as it was when originally deployed, enabling efficient routing and dramatic growth.

A black and white drawing of border gateway protocol's state diagram, at the bottom is the contact information of the two writers, Lougheed at Cisco and Yakov from IBM with their phone numbers and work times with time zones
Black handwriting on an aged page outlining a list of features of the border gateway protocol
Black handwriting on an aged page outlining the internal rules for the Border Gateway protocol

Kirk Lougheed, co-creator and Cisco's employee number 4, explains how BGP came to be.