Cisco Innovation Timeline

Building the basics

In the 1970s and '80s, the idea of computers talking to each other seemed like science fiction. Then came TCP/IP (1983), a common language for networks championed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. Soon, the Domain Name System mapped numeric addresses to readable names.

In 1984, Cisco started with a simple idea to link two disparate networks to connect and share information. Our first multiprotocol router (1986) let different networks communicate, becoming a cornerstone of the emerging internet backbone. These breakthroughs enabled email, streaming, global e-commerce, and everything that followed. From the start, the network showed a pattern: it didn't just connect; it unified technologies and standards, setting the stage for the digital transformations ahead.

1986

AGS multi-protocol router

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In 1986, Cisco forever changed the networking communications industry and the Internet by launching its first routing innovation, the AGS multi-protocol router. AGS stood for Advanced Gateway Server (AGS). Its successor model, AGS+, displayed here, was introduced in 1988.

1989

Border Gateway Protocol

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard, and the most scalable of all routing protocols. BGP is the routing protocol of the global Internet, as well as for Service Provider private networks. BGP has expanded upon its original purpose of carrying Internet reachability information, and can now carry routes for Multicast, IPv6, VPNs, and a variety of other data.
Photocopy of original Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) napkin as sketched out by Kirk Lougheed of Cisco and Yakov Rekhter of IBM at an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference.

The Internet goes public. And wireless.

By the '90s, the internet entered our homes. Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web (1991) and user-friendly services like AOL helped millions explore the digital world. This era sparked online shopping, email for everyone, and even the first hints of cybersecurity's importance. Early wireless standards (like IEEE 802.11 in 1997) freed us from cables, paving the way for Wi-Fi, mobility, and the seeds of remote work. Voice over IP (VoIP) began shifting phone calls online, and tools like CU-SeeMe hinted at a future of video collaboration.

The network was no longer just infrastructure—it was evolving into a unified platform that absorbed telephony, video, data, and wireless connectivity.

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1992

Cisco 3000

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In August 1992, Cisco inaugurated a new router platform with the Cisco 3000. The Cisco 3000 series offered complete multiprotocol routing and bridging in three configurations. The new models were the first low-end routers in the industry to use Flash memory, and the first Cisco routers to include Flash as a standard feature rather than an option. Flash EPROMs - electrically erasable, programmable, read-only memories - allowed faster and more reliable router software updating, maintenance, and servicing than the traditional methods of PROM replacement or booting from local floppy disks.

1993

Cisco 2500 Series

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In 1993, Cisco introduced a technology that would forever change the landscape of networking in remote offices - the Cisco 2500 Series. It was a compact, affordable enterprise router with a huge spectrum of available interfaces and features to hammer just about any networking nail. The 2500 was so reliable that they could still be found in offices and data centers around the world more than a quarter of a century after being introduced. Their initial success led to the Cisco 2600 and 3600 Series which would morph into the first generation of Integrated Services Routers followed by the ISR G2 and 800 Series routers all running the same Cisco IOS® operating system.

1995

Catalyst 5000 Series

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In March 1995, Cisco introduced the Catalyst 5000 Series, the first multi-layer modular system that brought together switching, routing and virtual LAN capabilities. It offered switching solutions for the needs of high-performance wiring closets for large enterprises and was also suited for small and mid-range enterprise backbones.

1996

PIX Security Appliances

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

The Cisco PIX® 501 Security Appliance (initially released in 1996) delivered enterprise-class security for small offices and teleworkers in a reliable, plug-and-play, purpose-built appliance. It was ideal for securing high-speed “always on” broadband environments, and provided robust integrated security capabilities, small office networking features, and powerful remote management capabilities in a compact, all-in-one solution.

The Cisco PIX® 506E Security Appliance delivered enterprise-class security for remote office, branch office, and small-to-medium business.

In 2005, Cisco introduced the newer Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (Cisco ASA), that inherited many of the PIX features.

1997

IP Telephony

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In October 1997, Cisco introduced the first in a series of products aimed at the voice-over-IP and fax-over-IP markets and outlined the first phase of its voice/video/data integration strategy. In September 1999, Cisco announced AVVID - the Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data for the enterprise.

What followed was a succession of intelligent client devices, including physical phone sets, IP enabled wireless phones, pagers, personal digital assistants, and other IP-enabled intelligent agents. By 2002, Cisco reached the shipping milestone of 1 million IP phones and doubled that volume by 2003.

2001

VPN 3002

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

At Partner Summit 2001, Cisco introduced the VPN 3002 Hardware Client, an innovative appliance for branch and home offices. Based on the new unified VPN client framework, the Cisco VPN 3002 Hardware Client was small, highly cost-effective and ideal for organizations where thousands of remote end-users were tunneling into corporate networks from large numbers of geographically dispersed branch or home office sites.

2002

Aironet 1100

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In November 1999, Cisco acquired Aironet Wireless Communications, Inc., a developer of high-speed wireless LAN products.

In October 2002, Cisco launched the Aironet 1100 Series Access Point, a Wi-Fi-certified, IEEE 802.11b-compliant wireless infrastructure product. The Cisco Aironet 1100 Series, along with the dual mode Cisco Aironet 1200 Series, offered enterprise customers flexible mobile networking with a choice of standards-based radio technologies, and a range of wireless applications.

The affordable Aironet 1100 Series was the first Cisco access point to be based on Cisco IOS® Software, a leading network system software for switches, routers and other wired network infrastructure equipment.

Becoming always connected

By the mid-2000s, the network enabled an age of constant connectivity. Facebook (2004) connected people worldwide. Apple's iPhone (2007) put powerful computing in our pockets, normalizing a world of apps and social media on the go. Cisco's TelePresence showed how seamless remote collaboration can be, with early holographic experiments foreshadowing future breakthroughs.

As more people joined online platforms, the network absorbed security, power (with innovations like Power over Ethernet), and the ability to deliver always-on connectivity. Yet, as society and business went digital, cybersecurity challenges grew. The network had to adapt, becoming the first line of defense. The social media and mobile computing that emerged from this era would deeply influence politics, culture, and daily life.

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2004

CRS-1

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In May 2004, Cisco unveiled one of the company's most significant routing innovations of the decade, the Cisco Carrier Routing System (CRS-1).

CRS-1 was a new class of routing system designed for telecommunications service providers to deliver next-generation data, voice, and video services over a converged Internet Protocol (IP) network. It was engineered for large-scale, high-bandwidth applications, such as video-on-demand, online gaming, and real-time interactive services.

With 92 terabits (92 trillion bits) per second of bandwidth capacity, when augmented by adequate network and transmission capacity, CRS-1 would have been capable of the following:

Downloading the entire printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress in 4.6 seconds, as opposed to 82 years on a dial-up modem at a transfer rate of 56 thousand bps.
1 billion people could have played an online game at the same time, using real-time voice & chat.
The entire global population (6.4 billion at the time) could have had a simultaneous phone call using Voice-over-IP technology.

In July 2004, the Guinness World Records certified the Cisco Carrier Routing System (CRS-1) as the highest capacity Internet router ever developed, at 92 Tbps of total throughput, designed to afford up to 100 times more capacity than previously available. The Cisco CRS-1 became the first networking technology to be recognized by the Guinness World Records.

2004

2800 Series Integrated Services Router

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In September 2004, Cisco announced a new line of integrated services routers, the industry's first routers to deliver secure, wire-speed data, voice, video, and other advanced services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprise branch offices, as well as service providers for managed network services offerings.

Founded on 20 years of routing innovation and leadership, the new Cisco 1800 Series, Cisco 2800 Series, and Cisco 3800 Series integrated services routers provided customers with an infrastructure that enabled fast, secure access to mission-critical business applications with optimized security, while establishing a foundation for the intelligent networks of the future.

2006

TelePresence

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In October 2006, Cisco announced the Cisco TelePresence Meeting solution, a revolutionary new category of products that created live, "face-to-face" meeting experiences over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Cisco TelePresence combined the reach, intelligence and reliability of the network with the simplicity of a telephone interface. The technology was developed by Cisco from the ground up including 25 patents. Meeting participants could feel as if they were in the same room together, with the ability to see and hear others in ultra-high definition video and wideband spatial audio.

Getting smarter with Big Data and the Cloud

By the late 2000s, billions of devices were generating massive amounts of data. The network evolved again, not just transmitting information, but analyzing and reacting to it in real-time. IoT devices - wearables, smart home thermostats, factory sensors - all relied on the network to function intelligently and instantly. Fog computing, pioneered by Cisco, brought processing closer to devices, reducing latency and making networks more agile. The network integrated IoT, cloud, and analytics to deliver insights and services at scale.

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2009

UCS B200 M2 Blade Server

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In March 2009, Cisco unveiled the industry's first Unified Computing System. With Unified Computing, Cisco created an architecture that bridges the silos in the data center using industry standard technologies. Displayed here, the Cisco UCS B200 M2 Blade Server is a two-socket, half-width blade server, using Intel's Xeon 5500 and 5600 Series processors with 12 DIMM slots, one mezzanine slot to hold an adapter card with support for the Virtual Interface Card (VIC), and up to two solid-state disk (SSD) drives or hard disk drives (HDDs). Up to eight half-width blade servers could be accommodated in the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis.

2009

NEXUS 5010

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

Responding to customers' needs to transform their data centers into virtualized environments, the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series was designed to help customers transition to a unified fabric at their own pace while meeting stringent requirements for operational continuity, transport flexibility and scalability.

Launched at Networkers 2009, the new Cisco Nexus 5010 supported 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Cisco Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel, able to consolidate traffic from local area networks, storage area networks and server cluster onto a single unified fabric. It also supported the Nexus 2000 (Fabric Extender) capability.

2010s

Ruggedized IoT Devices

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

Representing Cisco's ruggedized IoT portfolio: the Cisco Catalyst 2955T-12 industrial-grade switch, the CGR2010 ruggedized rack-mount router, and the 819HG ruggedized mobile router. The Cisco Catalyst 2955 was Cisco's first industrial-grade switch. It provided Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for deployment in harsh environments. Cisco CGR 2010 was the first rugged router optimized for use in the multitude of different communication networks found in the energy and utility industries.

The Cisco® 819 Integrated Services Router was Cisco's 1st compacted, hardened, small-form factor router. It was the smallest Cisco IOS® Software router with support for integrated fourth-generation (4G LTE) wireless WAN (mobile broadband backhaul) and WLAN capabilities.

2010s

Cisco Webex

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In 2007, the Cisco Webex journey started. Collaboration in the workplace became increasingly important, and companies started looking for rich communications tools to help them work more effectively and efficiently. Webex's portfolio made it possible to engage in real-time and asynchronous data conferences over the Internet as well as share web-based documents and workspaces.

2010s

Security innovations

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In the 2010s, a new wave of mobility, virtualization, and cloud technologies forced IT security specialists to deal with a multidimensional problem and to rethink how security must be implemented and enforced. Cisco continued to invest and innovate to address the rapidly changing security needs of businesses.

2011

Cisco Cius

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

Introduced in 2011, the Cisco Cius was an Android-based tablet created for the enterprise, combining voice, video, collaboration, and virtualization capabilities.

2012

Cisco Meraki

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In 2012, Cisco completed the acquisition of Meraki. The Meraki team became Cisco's Cloud Networking Group.

The MS22 Cloud-Managed, 24 Port Gigabit Access Switch was launched in 2012. The MS switch family became known as the world's first cloud-managed switch, and the only access switch on the market with integrated layer 7 (application) visibility.

The 2012 Meraki MR12 was an enterprise-class, single-radio, 802.11n cloud-managed access point, designed for small-to-medium businesses, home and branch offices, hotels, and retail stores.

The MX60 Security Appliance entered the market in 2010. It came with simple WAN, VPN, and NextGen Firewall, and with configuration from the cloud.

2017

Catalyst 9000

Join Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he walks down memory lane and shares insights about Cisco's iconic moments and technologies. Joined Cisco in 2000, Stuart is a passionate architect and possibility thinker.

In June 2017, Cisco introduced a new family of switches built from the ground up for the new realities of the digital era, centered on the demands of mobility, cloud, IoT and security. The Cisco Catalyst 9000 delivers unmatched security, programmability and performance by innovating at the hardware (ASIC) and software (IOS XE) layers. The engineer team that worked on the Catalyst 9000 reached out to Pininfarina, the design firm that helped design some of the Ferrari models, to come in and think about design.

Intelligence everywhere in the AI era

A new decade confronted the world with a challenge unlike anything seen in many of our lives - a global pandemic. Online became the frontline in an almost-overnight pivot to video calls and remote work. A highly resilient, globally scalable infrastructure kept people, communities, and businesses connected. Hybrid work became the norm for many. Education, business, healthcare, and social interactions have evolved beyond recognition and at a record pace. Life is more digital than ever.

Today, high-speed connections and chips, like Cisco's Silicon One, support complex AI workloads.

As AI soared, so did the complexity of securing our networks. GenAI tools appeared almost overnight, rewiring how we work, live, and play while raising new privacy and security risks. Cisco responded with AI-native security solutions like Cisco Hypershield, to protect data, devices, and applications across every environment, and AI Defense, an end-to-end solution that protects the development and use of AI applications, so enterprises can advance their AI initiatives with confidence.

2019

Silicon One

Hear from Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he shares insights on Cisco's latest innovations.

In December 2019, we launched Cisco Silicon One, aiming to revolutionize the future of the internet. This unified, scalable, programmable, and sustainable silicon architecture powers Cisco and third-party systems including top-of-rack (ToR) switches, web scale data centers, as well as service providers, enterprise networks, and data centers. As the first unified architecture for routing and switching, it offers scalable solutions and diverse consumption models. Now integral to over 60 Cisco platforms, it continues to innovate.

In June 2023, we unveiled the Cisco Silicon One G200, a 5 nm, 51.2 Tbps chip focused on Ethernet-based AI/ML and driving now web-scale deployments. Its key advantages solidify Cisco Silicon One's leadership in networking technology.

2020s

Collaboration in the era of hybrid work and AI

Hear from Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he shares insights on Cisco's latest innovations.

Today, employees and IT teams want solutions that enable seamless and intelligent collaboration. From delivering enhanced meeting quality to enabling increased productivity and streamlined device management, Cisco's new AI innovations are designed to transform work and workspaces.

2024

Splunk acquisition

Hear from Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he shares insights on Cisco's latest innovations.

The company that connects and protects the world joins forces with the security and observability leader.

2024

Hypershield

Hear from Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he shares insights on Cisco's latest innovations.

Bringing the power of hyperscaler technology to the enterprise, Cisco Hypershield is a groundbreaking security architecture designed to defend modern, AI-scale data centers. With this unprecedented innovation, Cisco is tipping the scales in favor of defenders, building on its announcements to accelerate AI infrastructure with Cisco's ethernet switching, silicon and compute portfolio.

2025

AI Defense

Hear from Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he shares insights on Cisco's latest innovations.

Announced in January 2025, Cisco AI Defense is a pioneering solution to enable and safeguard AI transformation within enterprises. It protects both the development and use of AI applications so enterprises can advance their AI initiatives with confidence. AI Defense safeguards against the misuse of AI tools, data leakage, and increasingly sophisticated threats, which existing security solutions are not equipped to handle. The innovative solution leverages Cisco's unmatched network visibility and control to stay ahead of ever-evolving AI safety and security concerns.

2025

Cisco Live U.S.

Hear from Stuart Dawson, Solutions Engineer Director at Cisco UKI, as he shares insights on Cisco's latest innovations.

At Cisco Live 2025, Cisco unveiled new innovations to help companies adapt and transform in the AI era, and navigate the shift to agentic AI. Read more.

AI-Ready Data Centers:

Nexus Dashboard
Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA
AI Defense in the Secure AI Factory
Live Protect

Future-Proofed Workplaces:

AgenticOps
Cisco Deep Network Model
AI Canvas
New networking devices

Digital Resilience:

Cisco and Splunk strengthen enterprise digital resilience in the AI era