CISCO IOS comes in at 13 in the list of the top 25 technologies. This is an interesting choice, because I feel it is probably the biggest advance in terms of communication in the last 25 years. 

CISCO IOS is the operating system for their routers. Originally written by William Yeager, it brought configurability, expandability and more to the CISCO routers. 

When wide area networks where first coming to the business world, we were very excited. There were two main players in the business, Cisco and 3COM. I was exposed to both technologies and I'll tell you, CISCO scared me.

The 3COM routers were all menu based with the nuts and bolts of the command functions hidden behind the program. Connecting networks, setting up protocols and adding routing tables was a snap. When you wanted to do something more advanced, though, you had to wait for 3COM to add it to the router.

With the CISCO routers you were presented with a command line. Everything was command line driven, which meant the learning curve was longer, but man, oh man, the control was greater. 

Today's CISCO IOS runs on routers and switches. It's become the defacto standard in the industry.  

Bookmark/Search this post with:
delicious | digg | reddit | furl | google | yahoo | technorati | icerocket