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Are coffee and networks the same?

I shall avoid naming names, but when I worked for Juniper we had a certain CEO who pumped us up as the next $10 billion company.  It never happened, and he left and became the CEO of Starbucks.  Starbucks has nothing to do with computer networking at all.  Why was he hired by Starbucks?  How did his (supposed) knowledge of technology translate into coffee?

Apparently it didn’t.  Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ former CEO, is back at the helm.  “I wasn’t here the last four years, but I’m here now,” he said, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal (paywall).  “I am not in business, as a shareholder of Starbucks, to make every single decision based on the stock price for the quarter…Those days, ladies and gentlemen, are over.”  Which of course, implies that that was exactly what the previous CEO was doing.

What happened under the old CEO?  “Workers noticed an increasing focus on speed metrics, including the average time to prepare an order, by store.”  Ah, metrics, my old enemy.  There’s a reason one of my favorite books is called The Tyranny of Metrics and why I wrote a TAC Tales piece just about the use of metrics in TAC.  More on that in a bit.

As I look at what I refer to as “corporatism” and its effect on our industry, it often becomes apparent that the damage of this ethos extends beyond tech.  The central tenet of corporatism, as I define it, is that organizations are best run by people who have no particular expertise other than management itself.  That is, these individuals are trained and experienced in generic management principles, and this is what qualifies them to run businesses.  The generic management skills are translate-able, meaning that if you become an expert in managing a company that makes paper clips, you can successfully use your management skills to run a company that makes, say, medical-device software.  Or pharmaceuticals.  Or airplanes.  Or whatever.  You are, after all, a manager, maybe even a leader, and you just know what to do without any deep expertise or hard-acquired industry-specific knowledge.

Those of us who spend years, even decades acquiring deep technical knowledge of our fields are, according to this ethos, the least qualified to manage and lead.  That’s because we are stuck in our old ways of doing things, and therefore we don’t innovate, and we probably make things complex, using funny acronyms like EIGRP, OSPF, BGP, STP, MPLS, L2VNI, etc., to confuse the real leaders.

Corporatists simply love metrics.  They may not understand, say, L2VNIs, but they look at graphs all day long.  Everything has to be measured in their world, because once it’s measured it can be graphed, and once it’s graphed it’s simply a matter of making the line go the right direction.  Anyone can do that!

Sadly, as Starbucks seems to be discovering, life is messier than a few graphs.  Management by metric usually leads to unintended consequences, and frequently those who operate in such systems resort to metric-gaming.  As I mentioned in the TAC Tale, measuring TAC agents on create-to-close numbers led to many engineers avoiding complex cases and sticking with RMAs to get their numbers looking good.  Tony Hsieh at Zappos, whatever problems he may have had, was totally right when he had his customer service reps stay on the phone as long as needed with customers, hours if necessary, to resolve an issue with a $20 pair of shoes.  That would never fly with the corporatists.  But he understood that customer satisfaction would make or break his business, and it’s often hard to put a number on that.

Corporatism of various sorts has been present in every company I’ve worked for.  The best, and most successful, leadership teams I’ve worked for have avoided it by employing leaders that grew up within the industry.  This doesn’t make them immune from mistakes, of course, but it allows them to understand their customers, something corporatists have a hard time with.

Unfortunately, we work in an industry (like many) in which the stock value of companies is determined by an army of non-technical “analysts” who couldn’t configure a static route, let alone explain what one is.  And yet somehow, their opinions on (e.g.) the router business move the industry.  They of course adhere to the ethos of corporatism.  And I’m sure they get paid better than I do.

Starbucks seems to be correcting a mistake by hiring back someone who actually knows their business.  Would that all corporations learn from Starbucks’ mistake, and ensure their leaders know at least something about what they are leading.

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A night of vi

Sun Ultra 10

It was four o’clock in the early hours of one Sunday morning in 2001.  I had been up all night sitting in our data center at the San Francisco Chronicle with our Unix guy.  He was handing off responsibility for managing the firewalls to the network team, and he was walking me through the setup.  He’d been trying all night to get failover to work between the two firewalls, and so far nothing was going right.

We were using Checkpoint which was running on Solaris.  Despite my desire to be Cisco-only, I was interested in security and happy to be managing the firewalls.  Still, looking at the setup our Unix guy had conceived, my enthusiasm was waning.

He drew a complex diagram on a piece of paper, showing the two Solaris servers.  There was no automatic failover, so any failure required manual intervention.  He has two levels of failover.  First, he was using RAID to duplicate the main hard disk over to a secondary hard disk.  If the main disk failed, we’d need to edit some text files with vi to somehow bring the Sparc Ultra 10 up on the second drive.  If the Ultra 10 failed entirely, we would have to edit some text files on the second Ultra 10 to bring it up with the configuration of the first.  With Unix guys, it’s always about editing text files in vi.

Aside from being cumbersome, it didn’t work.  We’d been at it for hours, and whatever disk targets he changed in whatever files, failover wasn’t happening. At the newspaper, we had until 5am Sunday to do our work, after which everything had to be back on line.  And we were getting concerned it wouldn’t come back at all.

Finally the Unix guy did manage to get the firewall booted up and running again.  On Monday I called Checkpoint and asked how we could get off Solaris.  They made a product called SecurePlatform, which installed a hardened Linux and Checkpoint all with one installer.  I ordered it at once, along with two IBM servers.

The software worked as promised, and I brought up a new system, imported our rules, and did interface and box failover with no problem.  I told the Unix guy to decommission his Ultra 10s.  He was furious that there was a *nix system on the network his team wasn’t managing.  I told him it was an appliance and there was no customization allowed.  The new system worked flawlessly and I didn’t even have to touch vi.

Network engineers are used to relatively simple devices that just work.  Routers and switches can be upgraded with a single image, and device and OS-level management is mostly under the hood.  While a lot of network engineers like Linux or Unix and have to work with these operating systems, at the end of the day when we want to do our job, we want systems that install and upgrade quickly, and fail over seamlessly.  As networking vendors move more into “software”, we need to keep that in mind.

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Blogging vs. Video

I must admit, I’m a huge fan of Ivan Peplnjak.  This despite the fact that he is a major thorn in the side of product management at Cisco.  It is, of course, his job to be a thorn in our side and Ivan is too smart to ignore.  He has a long history with Cisco, with networking, and his opinions are well thought out and highly technical.  He is a true network engineer.  The fact that I like Ivan does not mean he gave me an easy time a few years back when I did a podcast with him on NETCONF at Cisco Live Berlin.

Ivan had an interesting post recently entitled “Keep Blogging, Some of Us Still Read“.  It reminds of my own tongue-in-cheek FAQ for this blog, in which I said I wouldn’t use a lot of graphics because I intended my blog for “people who can read”.  As a blogger, I think I quite literally have about 3 regular readers, which occasionally makes me wonder why I do it at all.  I could probably build a bigger readership if I worked at it, but I really don’t work at it.  I think part of the reason I do it is simply that I find it therapeutic.

Anyhow, the main claim Ivan is responding to is that video seems to be dominant these days and blogging is becoming less rewarding.  There is no question video creation has risen dramatically, and in many ways it’s easier to get noticed on YouTube than on some random blog like mine.  Then again, with the popularity of SubStack I think people are actually still reading.

Ivan says “Smart people READ technical content.”  Well, perhaps.  I remember learning MPLS back in 2006 when I worked at TAC.  I took a week off to run through a video series someone had produced and it was one of the best courses I’ve taken.  Sometimes a technical person doesn’t want to learn by reading content.  Sometimes listening to new concepts explained well at a conversational pace and in a conversational style is more conducive to actually understanding the material.  This is why people go to trade shows like Cisco Live.  They want to hear it.

I’ve spent a lot of time on video lately, developing a series on technical public speaking as well as technical videos for Cisco.  In the process I’ve had to learn Final Cut Pro and DaVinci resolve.  Both have, frankly, horrendous user interfaces that are hard to master.  Nine times out of ten I turn to a YouTube video when I’m stuck trying to do something.  Especially with GUI-based tools, video is much faster for me to learn something than screen shots.

On the other hand, it’s much harder to produce video.  I can make a blog post in 15 minutes.  YouTube videos take hours and hours to produce, even simple ones like my Coffee with TMEs series.

The bottom line is I’m somewhere down the middle here.  Ivan’s right, technical documentation in video format is much harder to search and to use for reference.  That said, I think video is often much better for learning, that is for being guided through an unfamiliar concept or technology.

If you are one of my 3 regular readers and you would prefer to have my blogs delivered to your inbox, please subscribe at https://subnetzero.substack.com/ where I am cross-posting content!

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The Ghost of Jobs

A post recently showed up in my LinkedIn feed.  It was a video showing a talk by Steve Jobs and claiming to be the “best marketing video ever”.  I disagree.  I think it is the worst ever.  I hate it.  I wish it would go away.  I have deep respect for Jobs, but on this one, he ruined everything and we’re still dealing with the damage.

A little context:  In the 1990’s, Apple was in its “beige box” era.  I was actively involved in desktop support for Macs at the time.  Most of my clients were advertising agencies, and one of them was TBWA Chiat Day, which had recently been hired by Apple.  Macs, once a brilliant product line, had languished, and had an out-of-date operating system.  The GUI was no longer unique to them as Microsoft had unleashed Windows 95.  Apple was dying, and there were even rumors Microsoft had acquired it.

In came Steve Jobs.  Jobs was what every technology company needs–a visionary.  Apple was afflicted with corporatism, and Jobs was going to have none of it.

One of his most famous moves was working with Chiat Day to create the “Think Different” ad campaign.  When it came out, I hated it immediately.  First, there was the cheap grammatical trick to get attention.  “Think” is a verb, so it’s modified by an adverb (“differently”).  By using poor grammar, Apple got press beyond their purchased ad runs.  Newspapers devoted whole articles to whether Apple was teaching children bad grammar.

The ads featured various geniuses like Albert Einstein and Gandhi and proclaimed various trite sentiments about “misfits” and “round pegs in square holes”.  But the ads said nothing about technology at all.

If you watch the video you can see Jobs’ logic here.  He said that ad campaigns should not be about product but about “values”.  The ads need to say something about “who we are”.

I certainly knew who Chiat Day was since I worked there.  I can tell you that the advertising copywriters who think up pabulum like “Think Different” couldn’t  write technical ads because they could barely turn on their computers without me.  They had zero technological knowledge or capability.  They were creating “vision” and “values” about something they didn’t understand, so they did it cheaply with recycled images of dead celebrities.

Unfortunately, the tech industry seems to have forgotten something.  Jobs didn’t just create this “brilliant” ad campaign with Chiat Day.  He dramatically improved the product.  He got Mac off the dated OS it was running and introduced OS X.  He simplified the product line.  He killed the Apple clone market.  He developed new chips like the G3.  He made the computers look cool.  He turned Macs from a dying product into a really good computing platform.

Many tech companies think they can just do the vision thing without the product.  And so they release stupid ad campaigns with hired actors talking about “connecting all of humanity” or whatever their ad agency can come up with.  They push their inane “values” and “mission” down the throats of employees.  But they never fix their products.  They ship the same crappy products they always shipped but with fancy advertising on top.

The thing about Steve Jobs is that everybody admires his worst characteristics and forgets his best.  Some leaders and execs act like complete jerks because Steve Jobs was reputed to be a complete jerk.  They focus on “values” and slick ad campaigns, thinking Jobs succeeded because of these things.  Instead, he succeeded in spite of them.  At the end of the day, Apple was all about the product and they made brilliant products.

The problem with modern corporatism is the army of non-specialized business types who rule over everything.  They don’t understand the products, they don’t understand those who use them, they don’t understand technology, but…Steve Jobs!  So, they create strategy, mission, values, meaningless and inspiring but insipid ad campaigns, and they don’t build good products.  And then they send old Jobs videos around on LinkedIn to make the problem worse.

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Cross-posting on SubStack

I started this blog in 2016, and I never advertise it.  Partly this is because I don’t really care if people are reading it.  Partly it’s because I’m concerned some of my views might controversial in the industry and I don’t want to blast them far and wide.  When I started this blog, my goal was to provide clear technical explanations.  Ironically, given the title of the blog, my first big hits were articles about configuring Junos, such as the article on Juniper’s inet.3 routing table and the article on RIB groups.

Over time I started publishing memoir-type pieces, like my 10 years a CCIE series and TAC Tales.  I also started publishing reflections on the industry, business, and the corporate world in general.

The platform I’m using is WordPress on DreamHost, which requires a fair amount of maintenance.  Overall it’s been a good platform, and I like that I can make summary pages which collect my article series and make them easier to find.  I hate having to pick and customize themes and sometimes I have database issues.

SubStack is becoming a more popular platform and seems to be a lot easier to manage.  The subscription model works well also.  So, I imported the content of this blog into SubStack at https://subnetzero.substack.com/

For now I will cross-post between this blog and the substack to see how it goes.  I encourage any regular readers (if I have any!) to sign up there.  At this point I have no plans to charge for it.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to comment!

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The type A conundrum

An old theory of personality holds that people fall into two types–A and B.  Put simply, Type A personalities are highly aggressive and competitive, whereas Type B are not.  We all have seen this broad difference in personalities.  Some people we encounter seem ready to walk over their own grandmothers to get ahead.  Like all stereotypes, this is a gross oversimplification, but there’s a lot of truth in it.

In the corporate world, type A personalities tend to rise to the top.  Why?  Because their very personality is aggressive and competitive.  They like to push, push, push for what they want and are willing to drive their agenda at any cost.  They frequently are talkers but rarely listeners.  They also judge people through their own lens.  If you’re an introvert, quiet, or deliberative, if you’re a listener instead of a talker, they think you are not “driven” and probably not worth listening to or promoting.

The question is:  does being type A make you right?  Does it make your opinions more valuable?  I cannot think of any reason why being aggressive and competitive makes you more likely to be correct about anything.  In fact, I think the opposite is true.  If you don’t listen well and are always pushing your own agenda, you’re less likely to consider the opinions of others, which means your decision-making is less well-rounded.

I’ve pointed out before, that quiet, deliberative people, type B’s, are often the ones you really want to listen to.  However, in the corporate world, they are often kicked to the curb.  “He never says anything in meetings,” the type A’s say.  Well, if you hired him maybe he’s actually a smart person but has a hard time contributing in a meeting with 20 people all talking fast.  Maybe he needs time to digest what he heard before providing recommendations.

Type A’s tend to be in positions of power not necessarily because they are smarter but because they fight for position in hierarchies.  This is not to say they are without value.  Their decisiveness and drive are very important to a healthy organization.  They can break indecision and move companies forward in ways type B’s cannot.

The key for both personality types is the old Greek maxim:  know thyself.  If you’re type A, you need to be careful not to be too aggressive.  Listen to your quieter colleagues, accept that they may have a different personality, and meet them where they are at.  Call on them in meetings, give them time to deliberate and come back to you.

For type B’s, you need to learn to speak out more.  You’re probably more respected than you realize, and when you do speak, you’re probably listened to.  Try to find forums that are more comfortable for you, like expressing your opinion in writing or 1:1’s.

Sadly, because of the cutthroat nature of the business world, I see little self-awareness and frequent domination of businesses by type A’s.  At the end they may get people to follow them, but if they’re leading you off a cliff, their drive may not be such a good thing.

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It is the network

When I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, I started a project to bring Internet connectivity to a number of sites that had only limited mainframe circuits.  To do this I decided to get DSL lines and run IPSec over them, a relatively new way of doing things for the time.  It was a lot cheaper than the Frame Relay we used at larger sites.

After setting up connectivity at one of our sites, the local office manager called me.  Web pages, he said, were only loading partially.  Some of the text and none of the images would show up.

Everyone blamed the network for everything, so I punted him to desktop support.  I could ping across the tunnel, I could send traffic just fine, the latency was minimal, and nothing was obviously wrong.  The network is usually up or down, but web pages don’t partially load when everything else is working.  Degraded service might cause the pages to load slowly, but not partially.

The desktop guys told me it was my problem.  We had a constant battle, as nine times out of ten they blamed the network, and nine times out of ten it was not the network.  The office manager was getting angry, so I decided I would do some investigation on site and prove to the desktop guys that they were wrong.

I went to the office and fired up my laptop.  Pages were partially loading for me too.  Hmmm.  I did what every network engineer does and fired up a packet sniffer.

I could see the TCP handshake succeeding, and the browser requests and data exchange.  It looked normal, but why wasn’t the browser displaying the images?  I tried another browser and saw the same thing.

As I examined the sniffs, something hit me.  All the packets were being sourced with the Do not Fragment (DF) bit set in the header.  Could it be that the IPSec/GRE headers were causing the packets to be large enough to require fragmentation?  And why was Windows setting the DF bit anyways?

As I wasn’t a desktop guy, I left the latter question alone.  I jumped on the router and built a routing policy which cleared the DF bit on incoming packets.  The pages started loading fine.  I left the policy in place and hoped that there would not be any unanticipated consequences.  I never saw any.

Sometimes, it is, indeed, the network.

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Can you spare a quarter?

I’ve been thinking about the corporate world, how it operates, and the effects of corporatism on our lives.  If you’re a network engineer and think this is boring, pay attention.  Corporate culture, the influence of Wall Street, and the rise of a non-skilled management class have direct impact on your work and personal life.  The products you use are heavily influenced by corporate culture.  Why vendors release certain products, when, and how, are all controlled by corporate culture.  When a company tries to sell you something that doesn’t work and doesn’t serve your needs, when the company discontinues support for a product you bought after crashing and burning with it, when companies force products down your throat with buzzword messaging that means nothing to you, corporate culture explains it.

If you work in a corporation, the culture creates politics which affect what projects you work on, your career trajectory, and how you interact with your team.  In your personal life, the food you eat and drugs you take are very much explained by corporate culture.

I wrote in a previous post about the lack of anything permanent in the corporate world.  Everything seems to be temporary, everything is always in flux.  Companies are afflicted by short-term thinking, and short-term thinking is killing everyone.

One way this manifests itself is quarter-by-quarter thinking.  We all know sales people are judged on a quarterly basis, but corporations in general are as well.  Publicly traded companies have to present results to analysts, and thus to investors, every single quarter.  The results are compared against the last quarter, against the same quarter the previous year, and against other companies in the industry.  The results have a huge impact on stock price, executive compensation, and even executives’ jobs.

The effect of this trickles down to all levels of a public company.  Business units are judged by the quarterly performance of their products.  This means product managers are judged by the quarter, much like sales people.  Product managers are not commissioned directly like sales people, but they live and die by quarterly numbers.  As a result, they want to do everything possible to ensure quarterly numbers shine.

Now, imagine you are a product manager.  You have a deal worth, $20 million on the line if you deliver specific features the customer wants.  You are going to do anything possible to win the deal, so your quarterly numbers look good.  Now it probably is the case that the $20 million customer’s feature requests are specific to their environment.  That is, adding the features will help that one customer, but probably very few others.  So, instead of trying to build a product that caters to a broad range of customers who might bring smaller deals, you end up building a product that caters to a narrow set of customers that make you look good in your quarterly business reviews.

Now this type of short-term thinking might be an obvious problem if you planned to spend twenty years at your company.  But instead you spend two years at a company, so you only have to pull this off for eight quarters.  You can put big happy numbers in your LinkedIn profile (“successfully drove record quarter of $100 million in sales!”) and then exit stage right to repeat the process elsewhere.  And the folks left-behind have to clean up the mess.  Keep in mind your success within the company is also being judged by non-technical MBAs who are looking to do the same thing you are.

The companies that do the best long-term are those that eschew short-term thinking.  Apple is a great example of this.  They’ve had some disasters, but have generally taken risks to build products with long-term appeal.  I often mention Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, who while he had serious personal problems, forsook short-term gain for long-term performance.  Even within a company, quarterly thinking can vary by business unit and leader.

At the end of the day, however, it’s Wall Street that encourages this.  Like any metric, execs end up chasing their stock price like a dog chasing its tail.  It doesn’t get you anywhere, however much progress you may think you are making.  Meanwhile, you may get rich, but you leave disaster in your wake.

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Consulting Gigs

In my years in the corporate world, I’ve attended many corporate self-help type sessions on how to or increase leadership, creativity, and innovation.  There are many young consultants who are starting their careers off helping us to develop new skills in these areas, so I thought I would provide some helpful tips to get started.  Enjoy!

  1. If you are going to do consulting or presentations on innovation and leadership, it’s very important that you have never led anyone or invented anything.  Rather, you simply need to interview people who have done those things.  A lot of them.  Two or three thousand.  Actually, even if it’s only been 10 or 11, just say you’ve interviewed two or three thousand innovators or leaders.  This is called “research.”
  2. It’s especially important, if you are teaching career technology people how to innovate, that you loathe technology and cannot even upgrade your iPhone without help.  Remember, they may understand technology, but you understand how to innovate!  Two different things.
  3. You’re going to be making claims that are either wrong, or so obvious they don’t bear repeating.  Remember that you need to do several things to make those statements credible:
    • Begin by citing unverifiable claims from evolutionary biology as the basis for your statements.  Be sure to mention that we used to live out on open plains where we were at risk for being eaten.  Also be sure to mention “fight or flight.”  Bad:  “Strong leaders need to cultivate loyalty.” Good: “evolutionary biology has shown us that, back when we lived on the plain and were vulnerable to getting eaten by lions, our brains developed a need to be loyal to a leader.”
    • Next, cite the latest neuroscience to substantiate your claims.  In fact, it doesn’t have to be real neuroscience.  Remember, nobody will ever check!  Just say “the latest research on the brain has shown…” and leave it at that.  Bad:  “To be innovative we need time to think.”  Good:  “The latest neuroscience has shown that our brains can’t innovate when they are overwhelmed and don’t have time to reason properly.”
    • Remember, if you’re going to be hired by corporations and paid thousands of dollars in speaking fees, you need to state obvious truths in a technical way that makes you seem smart.  Invent new terminology so when you regurgitate to people what they already know, you sound authoritative.  For example, instead of saying, “criticism hurts people’s feelings and can cause them to leave,” invent a “criticism-despair cycle.”  Make a diagram with arrows showing “criticism->rejection->despair->attrition”.  See how much more impressive you sound already?
  4. It really helps if you are a “Doctor”.  There are many unaccredited diploma mills that will send you a Ph.D. based on your “life experience.”  Or better yet, just start calling yourself “doctor”.  Do you really think anyone will call and verify your doctorate?

Remember, the most lucrative careers don’t involve building skills through years of hard work, but telling people who know better than you how to do their jobs.  I hope you have a rewarding career as a consultant!

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My first Ethernet Network and Router

I’ve mentioned in the past how my first job in IT (starting in 1995) was as a “systems administrator” for a small company in Marin County, California.  The company designed and built museum exhibits, and its team of around 60 employees was split between fabricators, who built the exhibits, and office workers.  Some of the office workers did administrative work, while others were designers.  So, I was managing a network of around 30 computers, all Macs.

When I got to the company, the computers were networked using LocalTalk, a LAN technology from Apple, and specifically the PhoneNet variation.  PhoneNet was a product from Farallon Networks which enabled you to send the LocalTalk signal down a single pair of ordinary telephone wire.  The common practice was to use an extra pair of phone wires in the same cable that carried the user’s phone line.  In my first Netstalgia piece, I mentioned that my PhoneNet network was entirely passive, and ran into a lot of challenges as a result.

PhoneNet was also slow, and our designers had to transfer large files.  I decided to set up a separate Ethernet network for them.  All I knew about Ethernet was that it was faster, and that the higher-end PowerPC’s used by the designers supported it.  These computers had an AAUI port, a modification of the AUI port commonly in use for Ethernet connectivity at the time.  An AUI port required a transceiver to connect it to the Ethernet network.  Why?  Because we had Thicknet and Thinnet coaxial Ethernet, 10Base-T twisted pair and fiber optic Ethernet as well.  The universal AUI port (and Apple’s AAUI equivalent) gave you a choice of medium.

I didn’t really know how to make this work, and Google was not available at the time.  I had heard that you needed a “hub”, but I wasn’t sure exactly why or what the hub did.  The MacWarehouse catalogs I used to receive at the time advertised a product called an Etherwave, from the same company that made the PhoneNet transceiver.  The Etherwave allowed daisy-chaining of a twisted-pair Ethernet network.  I don’t know why, but this seemed easier and cheaper to me that buying a hub.  It was neither.

Farallon Etherwave Adapter

I bought a bunch of Etherwave adapters, got a ladder, and spend a night running Cat 3 cable in the suspended ceiling, and crimping RJ45 cubes.  Finally, I daisy chained everything together, and switched the computers to the new Ethernet network.  It worked very well–file transfers were screaming!

The designers loved it, but there was a flaw.  The Ethernet network was not connected at all to the LocalTalk network.  The LocalTalk network was where email, printing, and many other services resided.  Their computers had connections to both, but they had to go to a control panel and switch between one or the other.  That meant, if they wanted to do a file transfer, the two designers would have to shout to each other to switch networks, at which point they could do it peer-to-peer.

There was another problem.  Apple’s networking software, called OpenTransport, was notoriously buggy.  The switches between Ethernet and LocalTalk resulted in frequent crashes and reboots.  The initial thrill was wearing off.

I searched through catalogs and primitive websites looking for a solution.  I learned that I could buy a device called a router to connect the Ethernet and LocalTalk into a single unified network.  I desperately looked for the cheapest one.  My go-to vendor, Farallon, made a router but it was way too expensive.  Finally, I found a cheap router called a PathFinder manufactured by Dayna systems.

I went to my boss, the VP of operations.  I showed her the price (maybe $800?) and she balked.  This company ran a tight ship, and she said we couldn’t afford it.

I went back to our head designer and asked her to keep a post-in on her computer for a day, with a tally mark each time she had to reboot due to the Ethernet to LocalTalk switching.  Then we timed how long it took her to reboot.  I went back to my boss and showed her how much time was being lost each day to a single designer.  Her left hand flew over her the buttons on the calculator on her desk, then she looked up at me.  “Buy the router,” she said.

The PathFinder did indeed fix the problem.  And so my first Ethernet network, as well as my first experience configuring a router, came at a company in 1995 with 30 Macs, and I’ve spent decades working with both technologies since those days.

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