I stayed home today, working on my LAB and cleaning up a lot of junk. I came across this…

My attendance “cert” for the Advanced IP class

Wow…this was a long time ago, and I still remember the class and the instructor (great instructors will do that…thank you Johan Van Besouw). This was back when Bay Networks was relatively young…it was a merger between Wellfleet Communications (routers) and SynOptics Communications (Ethernet products). They had some great stuff, and their hardware just worked. Over those early years of my career, I installed many Bay routers and hubs, and some of their early switches. I do remember that router configuration was a bit problematic at times due to their Site Manager software, which we fondly referred to as  “Site Mangler”.

At the time I was working for a non-profit company in the San Francisco Bay area, and one of our projects was bringing the Internet into schools all over the Silicon Valley. I spent months installing T1 circuits at various schools, and upgrading their networks (if they even had one) with new Bay equipment. I remember many school principles would just look at me, and ask “So now what?”, after I got the Internet working….too funny, they just didn’t know what to do with it.

In the late 90’s, Bay Networks was purchased by Nortel. Around that time, I was at another company, and was looking at what direction to go for my network hardware needs….Bay or Cisco? I could not get a call back from Nortel…none of my old contacts were around, and the new reps were either too swamped or too clueless. It was an easy decision. About three months later, after my Cisco upgrades were almost completed, I finally got a callback from Nortel. It was a very short phone call.

And that, my friends, is why most of you have never heard of Bay Networks. And that is unfortunate.