By the measure of patents, Cisco’s journey started in February 1988, when the company’s first patent was filed. To put that time in context, that was the year President Ronald Reagan gave his last State of the Union address in his second term, U.S. sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner (aka Flo-Jo) set a still-standing women’s world record (21.34 seconds) in the 200-meter dash at the 24th Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea, and also the year when the Morris worm was distributed via the Internet, initially written to gauge the size of the Internet.
Cisco’s first U.S. patent—no. 5,088,032—was issued in 1992, for the Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP), an innovative protocol that improved efficiency in routing communications among computer networks, a foundational capability for the emergence of the Internet – the same year people were just beginning to hear about something called the World Wide Web.
To read the original article: 10,000 U.S. Patents Down–And Thanks to Our Amazing Innovators, Many More to Come
