Pioneers of the Internet
How Rensselaer Alumni Helped Change the Way the World Communicates
New networks began to appear throughout the 1970s and '80s, but they were still almost exclusively for the academic and research community.
Networking the Networks
In 1980 Paul Severino '69 was looking for an idea to start a new company and "almost by accident" found out about the emerging Ethernet technology. Ethernet is a set of networking protocols describing how digital signals are to be transmitted and how computers are to access the connecting cable.
"I didn't have the same background that the people who were doing network research in the universities had," he says, "but I realized that connecting computers together was going to be a very important thing.
"The idea was simple. There was an Ethernet standard, but no way to connect the Ethernet to the computers." Severino founded Interlan Inc., the first company to provide Ethernet adapter products, in 1981. The company became a significant player in the emerging field of local area networks (LANs) and by the time Severino sold it in 1985, Interlan was the leading supplier of Ethernet connectivity products for mini and microcomputer systems.
By now, PCs were beginning to make inroads into the corporate world—Time magazine's "Man of the Year" for 1982 was the personal computer—and networking was becoming more and more important. Although he did not yet have a strong sense of what a public internet might become, Severino's next company, Wellfleet Communications, was founded in 1986 on the assumption that businesses would want to connect their local area networks to each other.
The success of Wellfleet's high-end routers (devices that forward packets from one network to another) was nothing short of phenomenal. Fortune magazine named Wellfleet the fastest-growing company in the United States in both 1992 and 1993. In 1994, Wellfleet merged with Synoptics Communications and became Bay Networks. Four years later Bay Networks was acquired by Nortel Networks for $9 billion.
Taken from the September 2000 Rensselaer Magazine.
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