Bridge Communications, Inc. was founded by Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico

William N. Carrico, Jr.

William "Bill" N. Carrico, Jr. is a computer scientist and has founded several technology companies in the Silicon Valley area. He has been president and CEO of 3Com Corporation, senior vice president of Cisco Systems, and currently works at Packet Design LLC....

 in 1981 and was based in Mountain View, California. Bridge Communications made computer network bridges

Bridging (networking)

Bridging is a forwarding technique used in packet-switched computer networks. Unlike routing, bridging makes no assumptions about where in a network a particular address is located. Instead, it depends on flooding and examination of source addresses in received packet headers to locate unknown...

, routers, and communications server

Communications server

Communications servers are open, standards-based computing systems that operate as a carrier-grade common platform for a wide range of communications applications and allow equipment providers to add value at many levels of the system architecture....

s. They specialized in inter-connecting different kinds of networks.

Bridge Communications shipped the first commercial router.

Bridge Communications was acquired by 3Com

3Com

3Com was a pioneering digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney, Bruce Borden, and Greg Shaw...

on September 30, 1987.