Mike Cisco
1976 – Collins Radio engineer on the packet-radio hardware team whose equipment formed part of the Packet Radio Network (PRNET) used in the 1977 three-network Internet demonstration.
Summary of Contributions
Mike Cisco served on the Collins Radio engineering team that built and supported the packet-radio equipment underlying PRNET, one of the three live networks in the November 1977 demonstration that proved TCP internetworking across packet radio, ARPANET, and SATNET. The field proof of the Internet ran, in part, on hardware his team delivered.
Impact
The 1977 demonstration is the decisive field validation of internetworking: a data stream carried across three dissimilar networks, including a moving vehicle on packet radio, without human intervention at the network seams. That result depended equally on protocol design and on functioning radio hardware operating under real-world loss, contention, and mobility. Collins Radio built that hardware. The demonstration’s success moved internetworking from design theory to running proof, setting the course for TCP/IP’s adoption as the connective standard.
Influence
PRNET’s operational behavior under field conditions informed the refinement of internetworking protocols and demonstrated that packet networking could survive hostile, mobile, lossy environments – groundwork that echoes forward into every wireless packet system since.
Reach
Every network that has since joined the Internet joined an architecture whose feasibility was established in the demonstration his team’s equipment made possible.
Innovation
Building packet radios that worked – in motion, under interference, in the field – when no commercial packet radio industry existed and the requirements were being invented alongside the hardware.