William Yeager

William "Bill" Yeager (born June 16, 1940, San Francisco) is an American engineer. He is best-known for being the inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night," multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20 year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory.[1][2] The code was licensed by upstart Cisco Systems in 1987 and comprised the core of the first Cisco IOS.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Yeager