Kalpana

» see kalpana.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Before Kalpana was a company it was a person. Vinod Bhardwaj and Larry Blair named the firm after Bhardwaj's wife, whose name means imagination in Sanskrit, and then went and built something that is now underneath almost every network you have ever used. In 1990 Kalpana shipped the first multiport Ethernet switch, a seven-port unit it called the EtherSwitch.

The reason this mattered takes one paragraph of physics. Ethernet as originally designed was a shared road: every machine on the segment heard every frame, and when two of them transmitted at once the packets collided and both had to back off and try again. Hubs did not fix that, they just made the road a star shape. A switch reads the destination on each frame and delivers it only down the port where that machine lives, which means several conversations can be in flight at the same instant without ever touching each other. Kalpana shipped two models of it, the seven-port EPS-700 and the fifteen-port EPS-1500, and the company is also credited with putting full duplex on Ethernet in 1993, so a machine could talk and listen at once.

Cisco announced an agreement to buy the company on 24 October 1994 and completed it on 7 December, the day after the Kalpana shareholders voted. The release describes the 150-person firm in Sunnyvale as "considered to be the inventor of Ethernet switching". John Chambers, then an executive vice president, said the deal would extend Cisco's switching line down to small workgroups. Kalpana's name stopped existing that week and its switches went on being sold with Cisco's on them.

One date in this story will not settle. The company's own Wikipedia entry gives 1990 as the founding year in the infobox while filing the article under 1987 establishments in California, and the body of the same article puts the first switch in 1990 as well. A company founded and shipping the first switch of its kind inside twelve months is not impossible, but 1987 is the year that makes the engineering plausible, and this grave uses it with the conflict stated rather than hidden.

~ the case file ~

~ what Cisco actually paid ~

No dollar figure appears anywhere in either press release. Cisco bought Kalpana for 7,480,114 shares of its own stock and said only that the closing price on 21 October 1994 had been $27.25. Multiply the two and the deal comes to roughly $204 million, which is a number Cisco never printed and the trade press rounded upward for years afterward.

Charles Giancarlo was Kalpana's vice president of products and corporate development and ended up its general manager. He went to Cisco with the company and had a long run there before moving to Silver Lake. Jim Jordan was president at the time of the sale, and the October release quotes him calling the two firms culturally compatible.

~ the ideas that outlived the company ~

Switching itself is the obvious inheritance. The quieter one is EtherChannel: run several links between two switches in parallel and treat them as one fat pipe, an idea the rest of the industry adopted under the duller name of link aggregation. Kalpana also framed the virtual LAN as a closed broadcast domain years before anyone standardized it, and the standard that eventually arrived, 802.1Q, was written by other people.

The Turkish internet cafes I sat in between 2002 and 2005 ran on exactly this. Twenty machines on a Counter-Strike server in one room is the precise workload that collapses on a shared segment and works fine through a switch, and by then the switch was a cheap box nobody thought about, let alone credited. That is what a successful piece of infrastructure looks like from the user side: nothing at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »