William "Bill" Yeager is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 engineer

Engineer

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...

. He is best-known for being the inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night," multiple-protocol

Communications protocol

A communications protocol is a system of digital message formats and rules for exchanging those messages in or between computing systems and in telecommunications...

 router in 1981, during his 20 year tenure at Stanford

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

's Knowledge Systems Laboratory

Knowledge Systems Laboratory

Knowledge Systems Laboratory is an artificial intelligence research laboratory within the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, located at the Gates Computer Science Building, Stanford...

.
The code was licensed by upstart Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...

 in 1987 and comprised the core of the first Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS

Cisco IOS is the software used on the vast majority of Cisco Systems routers and current Cisco network switches...

.

He is also known 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

Kermit (protocol)

Kermit is a computer file transfer/management protocol and a set of communications software tools primarily used in the early years of personal computing in the 1980s; it provides a consistent approach to file transfer, terminal emulation, script programming, and character set conversion across...

 at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. He has also worked 5 years for NASA Ames Research Center

NASA Ames Research Center

The Ames Research Center , is one of the United States of America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration 10 major field centers.The centre is located in Moffett Field in California's Silicon Valley, near the high-tech companies, entrepreneurial ventures, universities, and other...

 and 10 years at Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

. At Sun as the CTO of Project JXTA

JXTA

JXTA is an open source peer-to-peer protocol specification begun by Sun Microsystems in 2001. The JXTA protocols are defined as a set of XML messages which allow any device connected to a network to exchange messages and collaborate independently of the underlying network topology.As JXTA is based...

 he filed 38 US Patents, and as Chief Scientist at Peerouette, Inc., 2 US and 2 European Union Patents. He has so far been granted 16 US Patents 4 of which are on High Performance Email Servers, and 12 on P2P and distributed computing.

He received his bachelor's degree

Bachelor's degree

A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...

 in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 in 1964; his master's degree

Master's degree

A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 in mathematics from San Jose State University

San José State University

San Jose State University is a public university located in San Jose, California, United States...

 in San Jose, California, in 1966; and completed his doctoral course work at the University of Washington

University of Washington

University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

 in Seattle, Washington in 1970. Then decided to abandon mathematics for a career in software engineering and research to the skepticism of his thesis advisor because Bill thought the future was in computing.

External links

• Sun Microsystems biography
• Valley of the Nerds: Who Really Invented the Multiprotocol Router, and Why Should We Care?
• "A start-up's true tale", Mercury News, 2001-01-12
• Interview at Networkworld.com

Patents

• Personal Server and network - Patent Application for Peerouette P2P Technology
• Global community naming authority - Patent Application for Peerouette P2P Technology
• [US Patent 6,167,402 - High Performance Message Store]
• [US Patent 6,735,770 - Method and apparatus for high performance access to data in a message store]
• [US Patent 6,418,542 - Critical signal thread]
• [US Patent 6,457,064 - Method and apparatus for detecting input directed to a thread in a multi-threaded process]
• [US Patent 7,065,579 - System using peer discovery and peer membership protocols for accessing peer-to-peer platform resources on a network]
• [US Patent 7,127,613 - Secured peer-to-peer network data exchange]
• [US Patent 7,136,927 - Peer-to-peer resource resolution]
• [US Patent 7,167,920 - Peer-to-peer communication pipes]
• [US Patent 7,213,047 - Peer trust evaluation using mobile agents in peer-to-peer networks]
• [US Patent 7,203,753 - Propagating and updating trust relationships in distributed peer-to-peer networks]
• [US Patent 7,222,187 - Distributed trust mechanism for decentralized networks]
• [US Patent 7,254,608 - Managing Distribution of Content Using Mobile Agents in Peer-to-Peer Networks]
• [US Patent 7,275,102 - Trust Mechanisms for a Peer-to-Peer Network Computing Platform]
• [US Patent 7,290,280 - Method and apparatus to facilitate virtual transport layer security on a virtual network]
• [US Patent 7,308,496 - Representing Trust in Distributed Peer-to-Peer Networks]
• [US Patent 7,340,500 - Providing peer groups in a peer-to-peer environment]