The introduction that produced everything downstream
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Stanford computer science professor, distributed systems researcher, and one of the two men who wrote the first cheques into Google. Best known publicly for that investment; better known inside the field for a long run of networking companies, several of which ended up inside Cisco.
When Jonathan Hare knew him in the nineties he was not yet rich. He had one company — Hybrid Networks, built around asymmetric bandwidth: a fat pipe down, a thin one up, the shape that cable internet later took. Granite Systems came afterwards and went to Cisco; then Kealia, and then Arista Networks with Andy Bechtolsheim.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Hare liked ATM — Asynchronous Transfer Mode — and said so. Cheriton's response was that it was elegant and would never be adopted, that if the industry simply started routing IP it would work, and that the whole ATM push was a scam by the telecom vendors to hold on to their hegemony over the industry. He was angry about it in a way that stuck in the memory thirty years later. He was also completely right, which is the part worth recording.
Cheriton introduced Hare to Andy Bechtolsheim. Everything in this cluster — Bill Joy, the ARPANET conversation, the Sun lineage — descends from that one introduction.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Gave Hare Bill Joy's personal email address
Open →two hops: via Bechtolsheim"Bill knew."
Open →wrote one of the first two chequesTwo men in this graph wrote the first two
Open →was right about, early and loudlyThe elegant protocol that lost
Open →sold Granite Systems toWhere the networking industry went
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-155The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-156The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →