Leonard Bosack
| Leonard Bosack | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater |
University of Pennsylvania Stanford University |
| Known for | Co-Founder of Cisco Systems |
| Spouse(s) | Sandy Lerner (divorced) |
Leonard X. Bosack (born 1952) along with his former wife Sandy Lerner, is a co-founder of Cisco Systems, an American-based multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking and communications technology and services. He was awarded the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009 for co-founding Cisco Systems and pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology and the profound changes this technology enabled in the computer industry.
He is largely responsible for pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN) technology to connect geographically disparate computers over a multiprotocol router system, which was unheard of technology at the time. In 1990, Cisco's management fired his wife Sandy Lerner, and Bosack resigned. Bosack is currently the CEO of XKL LLC, a privately funded engineering company which explores and develops optical networks for data communications.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1952 to Polish Catholic family, Leonard Bosack graduated from La Salle College High School in 1969. In 1973, Bosack graduated from the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania, and joined DEC as a hardware engineer. In 1979 he was accepted into Stanford University, and began to study computer science. During his time at Stanford, he was credited for becoming a support engineer for a 1981 project to connect all of Stanford's mainframes, minis, LISP machines and Altos.
His contribution was to work on the network router that allowed the computer network under his management to share data from the Computer Science Lab with the Business School's network. He met his wife Sandra Lerner at Stanford, where she was the manager of the Business School lab, and the couple married in 1980. Together in 1984 they started Cisco in Menlo Park.
In 1984, Leonard Bosack co-founded Cisco with the aim of commercializing the Advanced Gateway Server. The Advanced Gateway Server was a revised version of the Stanford router built by William Yeager and Andy Bechtolsheim. Bosack and Lerner designed and built routers in their house and experimented using Stanford's network. Initially, Bosack and Lerner went to Stanford with a proposition to start building and selling the routers, but the school refused. It was then that they founded their own company and named it "Cisco," taken from the name of the city to the north.
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