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Cisco's first hugely successful product lines, the AGS and AGS+, were growing long in the tooth early in the decade. The AGS used Motorola's 68000 CPU (the same one found in Apple Macintoshes of the day) and did all route processing at the CPU. Because of that, the AGS routed no more than roughly 100,000 packets per second in a typical configuration. The industry was pleading for better performance, and Cisco answered with the 7000 series and eventually the 7500.

Although the Cisco 7500 is still going strong in corporate America today, the demands on core Internet routers have long since passed the series by. Nowadays, the 7500 performs WAN-access aggregation, Internet-access routing, and enterprise core routing. Not so long ago, however, the 7500 was also the mainstay of Internet core routing.

Starting with its 7000-series router, Cisco led the pack in this arena by delivering a robust, service-provider-oriented platform with all the bells and whistles demanded by that class of user. Hot-swappable line cards, redundant power supplies, environmental monitoring and flash software-code upgrades are just a few of the short-list items the 7000 series brought to the multiprotocol routing market. But while the 7000 represented a big improvement in performance over Cisco's original AGS series, it was just a small step toward the requirements of the Internet. The 7000 quickly gave way to the more scalable distributed-processing architecture of the 7500. And with the 7500, Cisco struck gold.

The key innovation found in Cisco's 7000-series router was the SSE (silicon switching engine). For the first time in a router, part of the CPU-intensive work of looking up addresses and moving packets from one interface to another was taken over by hardware. Cisco improved on this technology with the introduction of the RSP (Route Switch Processor) and VIP (Versatile Interface Processor) distributed-switching module. The performance of the Cisco 7500 climbed above 1 million packets per second--a milestone in its time. The 7500 flourished as a series, with four chassis versions and numerous interface options.

Today, Cisco's Gigabit Switch Router (GSR) platform delivers hundreds of millions of packets per second using the latest of Cisco's hardware innovations, called Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF). CEF is the natural evolution of the SSE and the VIP architecture. Although it faces stiff competition from Juniper Networks, the GSR platform has the cajones necessary to drive the terabit-routed networks of the future.

Cisco's marketing throughout the decade gave it a foot in the door with almost every potential router customer; the solidly engineered 7500 did the rest. The industry sang the praises of the 7500 as a workhorse that could get the job done, and Cisco backed the product with solid service and support. The company has now turned its eye toward the next big markets, such as IP telephony. Will it dominate those markets as it has the data-routing arena? If history is any indication, Cisco will remain a force to be reckoned with. Will Cisco turn out a product line like the 7500, which found its way into virtually every corner of the Internet? Only time will tell.