Just because something is/was widely deployed does not mean it was good

runjake 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't, but Cisco was great and they've just evolved into a laughing stock. Their stuff is really bad these days.

And they've overstretched their product line to too many things, trying to be the "be all" company. Fortinet is making the same mistake, but they're earlier in that process.

I mean, it's not really a mistake on their parts, their primary goal is to get rich and they are succeeding.

Citation: I've been working with Cisco technologies since the mid-1990s. At my current job, we are a few weeks away from phasing out the last of our Cisco junk. And since people will ask: to Juniper/Mist and Arista.

	▲	ThePinion 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was curious but wasn't going to ask, so thank you for adding it!

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icedchai 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

True. There were few (no other?) options for routers back then. I have fond memories of locking myself out of an ISP's core router then having to power cycle it.

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bombcar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I remember routers being Very Expensive and so realizing you could route 10mb/s with an old Pc and some 3com cards and BSD was a big deal.

	▲	smackeyacky an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Funnily enough that isn’t too far from where Cisco themselves started. When they started making smallish dedicated routers I remember opening one to see a dodgy backplane and a number of big boards plugged in held up only by minimal slides. The minute it got hot (which it did because no air management) those boards sagged in the middle and it just looked slapdash. The 3Com equivalents were always better built but Cisco had such mindshare it didn’t matter the products were a bit crap
	▲	icedchai 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yep! I remember one of the ISPs I worked for paying like $15K for a Cisco 4500 router with 8 synchronous serial ports and a couple of 10 megabit ethernets. We'd laugh at the sorta bandwidth today. We had a bunch of T1s and a couple of Ascend boxes off of the ethernet.