Bosack is largely responsible for first pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN), which was unheard of technology at the time. His contribution was to work on the network router that allowed the computer network to share data from the Computer Science Lab with the Business School’s network. He met his wife Sandra Lerner at Stanford, where she was the manager of the Business School lab, and the couple married in 1980. Together, in 1984, they started Cisco in Menlo Park-or so the story goes. There were accusations surrounding Bosack and his wife being solely credited for the invention of the protocol router and starting Cisco basically in their living room with their own money. Reportedly, Stanford University’s web site credits only Bosack and Lerner with developing the device that allowed computer networks to communicate intelligently with one another, despite Cisco spokeswoman Jeanette Gibson’s claim that it was obviously a group effort.
