“Two Guys and a VAX” — the class project, and the door into Microsoft
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A cross-platform, multi-protocol networking company — TCP/IP software bridging Macintosh, PC, Unix and VMS systems. Backed by Technology Venture Investors, where David Marquardt was a general partner and on whose board he served.
It went public and was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996 for around $115 million — which is why this thread, like so many in this graph, ends at Cisco.
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Wyc Grousbeck arranged the introduction to Marquardt and proposed a class project for one of his portfolio companies. Jonathan Hare — in his own words a commune boy — did not know what a venture capitalist was. He had never encountered the concept.
Correction: this record previously identified the company as TOPS, the Macintosh daisy-chain networking product then inside Sun Microsystems. The company was TGV Software, which operated in the same niche and whose board Marquardt sat on through TVI. Hare's recollection of the sector was right and the name was wrong.
TGV bridged Macs and PCs to VAX systems running VMS — which Hare knew intimately, because VAX was the primary environment in the Berkeley engineering departments, alongside DEC's PDP line for real-time control. He had also taken a course on IBM's Systems Network Architecture. He was, unusually for a business student, already fluent in the exact problem.
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Microsoft's board, the TOPS study, and the door into everything
Open →the project partnerGave Hare his nickname, and the introduction that started the arc
Open →whose class the project was forThe class Hare got stuck in, which changed everything
Open →acquired it in 1996Where the networking industry went
Open →whose VAX and VMS systems it bridged toVAX, VMS, PDP — and the machines Hare learned on
Open →the same cross-platform problem, one layer upOmnis — the only client-server tool that worked across everything
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-019The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-153The 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.
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