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Tom Lyon's Personal Blog

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Last post: Nov 10, 2022
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Mastodon
Nov 10, 2022 · original
As Twitter crumbles, I’ve started using Mastodon at @aka_pugs@mastodon.social
Founding Nuova Systems
Aug 25, 2022 · original
OTD 2005: Nuova Systems is founded, and I get to carry a $10M check to the bank. I was especially careful handling the check, because when Ipsilon was funded back in 1994, one of the VCs lost his check in the bushes outside the office! In 2004 I had started Netillion, but we never made it past seed funding. We spent the summer of 2005 trying to sell the team and/or IP of Netillion, including to Sun and Cisco. At the same time, the famous MPLS team had “retired” from Cisco, and they were putting together a startup. MPLS = Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani. Perhaps the most legendary team in Silicon Valley. Mario and Luca had been together since Olivetti. Prem joined them at David Systems (with my sister-in-law Peggy Asprey). I think Soni joined at Crescendo – which became Cisco’s first acquisition. They went through incredible growth and countless acquisitions at Cisco
William L. Lyon, Jr.
May 21, 2022 · original
1/ Today would’ve been the 100th birthday of William L. Lyon, Jr. – my dear father, Lyon family patriarch, inveterate tinkerer, lover of math & science tricks & puzzles, and a kind, humble, and generous man/nerd. And he kept the lights on for the City of El Paso. 2/ Daddy was born in 1922 and mostly raised in El Paso. His parents were a traveling salesman, ex National Guard Captain from Georgia and a college-educated teacher – a multi-generational Texan woman from Marfa. (I think his clothing got simpler after the depression hit) 3/ By the time he was in his teens, it was clear he suffered from “The Knack” – insatiable curiosity, tinkering and building. Here he is at age 14 (1936) in a model airplane contest. (2nd from left, looks like a blue ribbon on his plane!) 4/ On his 96th birthday, his friend Tom presented him with a fully restored plane that my Dad and a friend first built and fl
3Mb Ethernet and Holy Wars
May 17, 2022 · original
1/ Almost the 49th birthday of Ethernet (3Mb)! Here’s another History lesson and a story about my role in “holy wars” with 3Mb Ethernet and UNIX. Few people realize how long-lived and widespread 3Mb Ethernet became… 2/ May 22, 1973 is considered the birthday of “3 Megabit” Ethernet, when Bob Metcalfe published his memo at Xerox PARC detailing its planned operation. 3/ But it’s not really 3Mbps, it’s 2.94 Mbps. That speed is 1/2 of the clock rate of the Xerox Alto computer, and that clock rate was determined by the access speed of DRAM at the time. 4/ Bob Metcalfe liked to point out that the difference between 3Mbps and 2.94Mbps was greater than the Arpanet backbone speeds back then! 5/ By 1980 or so, 3Mb Ethernet was pretty common within Xerox, and was spreading to partner universities like Stanford and CalTech. There were a number of other computers and printers designed by Xerox with E
Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago
May 3, 2022 · original
40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here’s the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! I started out in Silicon Valley in June of 1978 working at Amdahl Corp. porting UNIX to the mainframe, a revival of the work started at Princeton in 1975. Sometime in late ’80 I moved over to Amdahl’s architecture group to work on data communications – X.25, SNA, etc. But that work wasn’t too satisfying. During the UNIX/UTS work I had been up to Berkeley a few times to see talks by Bill Joy and others about BSD UNIX (I think I was the first person to implement the select system call, though it never made it to product). Anyways, I guess Bill remembered me. There was *intense* startup fever in the Silicon Valley in 81/82. I was caught up in it and actively looking for a startup – I even bought books and magazines about starting compan
From Punched Cards to SmartNICs: A Personal Journey
Oct 22, 2021 · original
Preface This series was originally a DriveScale blog series, and is recovered here thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine. Intro One of the DriveScale predictions for 2020 is that 2020 is the year of the SmartNIC! But, what is a SmartNIC? In this blog series – covering 7 decades – you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about Front-End Processors, er, I mean SmartNICs. And you’ll see how my personal history with computers is deeply intertwined with the SmartNIC concept. I’m a huge fan of computing history, a collector, and a pack rat, so there’ll be some interesting illustrations… Part 1: The 1950s Computers are older than I am, but only by about 5 years. Since the dawn of computing, computers have been helped out – offloaded – by less expensive devices. The first computers in the early 50s, like the IBM 701 , had so little memory that they were actually not very good at
Ipsilon Networks, Inc.
Apr 10, 2021 · original
After I left Sun in May of 1994, I became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Mohr, Davidow Ventures. My good friend Jon Feiber (Amdahl & Sun) had left Sun to become a venture capitalist there. The job of an EIR is ill-defined, but it hopefully leads to a company. I had a couple of ideas I thought were worth pursuing, so, ensconced alone in an office annex of MDV, I spent a few months noodling (and getting on a first name basis with the squirrels outside my window). By November, the idea for Ipsilon was well developed and vetted with a handful of people. First person outside of MDV to hear the pitch was Hermann Hauser of Cambridge/Acorn/ARM fame, who happened to be visiting MDV. As I recall, he was pretty neutral about the idea. Check out the original “pitch”: IpsilonPitch Download Anyways, with Jon’s friend Andy Rachleff, then of Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre, we put together a $3.5M
My Extended (Irreverent) Biography
Mar 29, 2021 · original
Lost in the digital wilderness at an early age, Tom Lyon was adopted by feral punched card equipment that taught him to speak FORTRAN and inducted him in the cult of the mainframe. After being rescued by a search algorithm of his own devising, he handily won a tri-state programming contest and was made to promise not to re-enter. In high school, he routinely abused the programmable calculators when he was not helping the teachers with their programming assignments. A summer’s NSF program in Hoboken opened his eyes to the potential of interactive computing (and digital porn). While in New Jersey, he also conducted a surreptitious census of the PDP-11s at the Bell Labs Holmdel site, and his faith in the mainframe was badly shaken. Placed into the world’s finest liberal arts university, Lyon spent most of his time in the basement of the computer center. A chance encounter with a fellow stud
Appletalk History
Mar 21, 2020 · original
Who’s ready for more Networking History? – all about APPLETALK! When the Apple Macintosh came out in 1984, it came with a new serial port implementation. Initially, it looked like nothing special – a port for a modem, a port for a printer. But internally it used the Zilog Z8530 SCC, which was a deviation from the 8274 used by the PC world. Coincidentally, Sun also used the Z8530 for serial ports all through the 80s (at least). In January 1985, Apple announced the Apple Laserwriter, the first mass-market laser printer. And with it, they announced the Appletalk and Localtalk networking protocols. The Laserwriter and Postscript were developed by Adobe Systems (who used Suns as their prototype platform) Localtalk was the Appletalk link layer for serial ports – astounding because somehow Apple could get the measly serial port to run at 230Kbps in a multi-access network. PCs of the day were li
Ethernet History – The Switching Abomination
Mar 9, 2020 · original
0/ More Ethernet history? Learn why Ethernet Switching is an (extremely successful) ABOMINATION!!! 1/ So, the DEC/Intel/Xerox 10Mb Ethernet spec came out in 1980. The same year, ISO published a draft of the 7 layer OSI model ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model ) 2/ Now, unlike the later OSI *protocols*, the OSI *model* was widely regarded as a good thing, and codified what was pretty much true of many protocol stacks – TCP/IP, Xerox XNS, DECnet, etc. 3/ In the OSI model, packet forwarding only happens at layer 3 – the Internetwork layer. L3 forwarding is *necessary* to go between different types of L2 networks, and is *sufficient* to forward between different L2 networks of the same type. Thus was born Cisco! 4/ Routing and forwarding were not trivial problems and involved a bunch of immature software, running on the pathetically slow processors of the ‘80s. Not a problem for WAN routing,

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