Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer
operations stave members at Stanford University, later joined next to
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to govern java documents at Schlumberger, moving entire in days of yore to
Cisco in 1987. The delegate "Cisco" was derived from the municipality entitle,
San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on
using the discredit lawsuit "cisco" in the antiquated days. For Cisco's first
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally
written some years earlier by William Yeager, another Stanford worker
who later joined Brown Microsystems. The retinue's earliest CEO was Tabulation
Graves, who held the placement from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 by way of John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the original company to bring out and push a router, it
was a given of the first to retail commercially well-heeled routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the ip Guide became greatly
adopted, the account of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are primarily cast-off to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the group went societal (with a superstore capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq reservoir exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the news, Bosack resigned to exhibit his funding in compensation her.
Bosack and his partner walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was
committed to charities. The two later divorced.

Cisco acquired a variety of companies to disgorge in products and tendency into the
company. In 1995-1996 the attendance completed 11 acquisitions. A number of acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the industry when they occurred.
During the Internet explosion in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up society located in Petaluma, California, in the course of fro US$7 billion.
It was the most expensive acquisition made nearby Cisco to date, and single the
obtaining of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. Dissimilar acquired companies
get grown into $1Bn+ province units for the purpose Cisco, including LAN switching,
Enterprise Utter to the ground Internet Usage (VOIP), and home networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In dilatory Parade 2000, at the apogee of the dot-com increase, Cisco router was the most
valuable gathering in the existence, with a peddle capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a vend cap of about US$108.03 billion,
it is pacify one of the most valuable companies.

The company was a 2002-03 legatee of the Ron Brown Prize, a U.S.
presidential honor to accept companies "an eye to the superior quality
of their relationships with employees and communities".