FORE Systems acquired Nemesys in 1996 and our products were rebranded under FORE Systems and sold alongside their core ATM switching products. We were successful with some large installations of several thousands of units each but for the most part we sold small numbers to research and development teams. I was the Director responsible for the original Nemesys products within FORE.

FORE was a CMU spinoff head-quartered in Pittsburgh and was one of the fastet growing companies in the US in the early to mid ’90s. They made a number of aquisitions in the Bay Area, and I moved to join one of those, Berkeley Networks, in the spring of 1999 as an individual contributor working on the management software for their ESX switches and routers. These were notable products since they were among the first to have programmable ‘forwarding engines’ that gave Ethernet/IP switches/routers the speed, low latency and flexibility originally promised by ATM networks but at a far lower cost. Berkeley Networks popularised the notion of ‘Application Aware Networking’ to refer to a switch’s ability to preferentially treat the flow for a particular application over those of other less critical applications (e.g. prefer Oracle RDBMS traffic over emai).

FORE was itself acquired in the early fall of 1999 by GEC (the UK equivalent of GE) and the combined company rebranded as Marconi plc. 1999 was a crazy time in the networking and internet industries and as soon as the acquistion closed many people took jobs at other startups to spin the wheel one more time! I ended up managing FORE’s switching and routing group for the latter part of 1999 before join Akamai.