William (Bill) Yeager

Inventor of the multi-protocol router and network operating system, Yeager is best known for creating a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night," multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20-year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory. The code was licensed by upstart Cisco Systems in 1987 and comprised the core of the first Cisco IOS. He is also recognized for his role in the creation of the IMAP mail protocol, and for writing the ttyftp serial line file transfer program, which was developed into the Macintosh version of the Kermit protocol at Columbia University.

He also worked 5 years for NASA Ames Research Center and 10 years at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, as the CTO of Project JXTA, he filed 38 US Patents, and as Chief Scientist at Peerouette, Inc., 2 US and 2 European Union Patents. Yeager has been granted 16 US Patents — 4 of which were on High Performance Email Servers, and 12 on P2P and distributed computing. He has served as a founder and CTO at 4ZiGo, Inc.