Spurred by our phenomenal growth and cementing our founding in Silicon Valley, Cisco opens our San José Campus, moving corporate headquarters to our first custom-designed site.
Cisco became the world’s most valuable company, in terms of market capitalization, on March 27, with a high of $82 a share (market cap: $569B).
As networking booms with new levels of connection, and more challenges in connectivity, we launch Networkers Users symposiums - also known as "Networkers." The conference, later renamed CiscoLive!, enables customers to learn, collaborate, and grow the industry together.
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.
Kirk Lougheed, co-creator and Cisco's employee number 4, explains how BGP came to be.
John Morgridge joins Cisco as President and CEO. Morgridge grew the company from $5 million to more than $1 billion in sales and from 34 to more than 2,250 employees. In 1990 he took Cisco public, in 1995 was appointed chairman, and in 2006 became chairman emeritus.
John Morgridge joins Cisco as President and CEO. Morgridge grew the company from $5 million to more than $1 billion in sales and from 34 to more than 2,250 employees. In 1990 he took Cisco public, in 1995 was appointed chairman, and in 2006 became chairman emeritus.
Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital provides cisco's first infusion of outside funding, $2.5 million in December 1987. While the early company was profitable, the clout of VC funding allows the company to grow exponentially.
Cisco goes public on February 16, 1990, listed as “CSCO” on the NASDAQ. Cisco celebrates the public offering with a market capitalization of $224 million.
Cisco's name derived from a shortening of San Francisco and dropped standard capitalization conventions for 'cisco Systems', the lower-case c a cultural touchpoint for early engineers. As early networking devices were known as bridges, an abstraction of the Golden Gate Bridge became the first logo, formed via parabolic equations by founder Len Bosack.
Founders Sandy Lerner (left) and Leonard Bosack (center) incorporate cisco Systems. They dream of disparate networks talking with each other and sharing information reliably. But in order for the networks to be truly interconnected, a technology has to be invented that can deal with the disparate local area protocols. With that dream, the multi-protocol router is born.
Experimenting with connecting detached networks, Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner run network cables between two different buildings on the Stanford campus. Bosack as director of computer facilities for Stanford's Computer Science Department, and Lerner the same title in the Graduate School of Business, imagine new methods of interconnection.
