Leonard Bosack

Leonard X. Bosack (born 1952) is a co-founder of Cisco Systems, an American-based multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking and communications technology, and services. His net worth is approximately $200 million. He was awarded the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009 for co-founding Cisco Systems and pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology and the profound changes this technology enabled in the computer industry. He is largely responsible for pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN) technology to connect geographically disparate computers over a multiprotocol router system, which was an unheard-of technology at the time. In 1990, Cisco's management fired Cisco co-founder Sandy Lerner and Bosack resigned. , Bosack was the CEO of XKL LLC, a privately funded engineering company which explores and develops optical networks for data communications. Born in Pennsylvania in 1952 to Polish Catholic family, Bosack graduated from La Salle College High School in 1969. In 1973, Bosack graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, and joined the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as a hardware engineer. In 1979, he was accepted into Stanford University, and began to study computer science. During his time at Stanford, he was credited for becoming a support engineer for a 1981 project to connect all of Stanford's mainframes, minis, LISP machines, and Altos. His contribution was to work on the network router that allowed the computer network under his management 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. In 1984, Bosack co-founded Cisco Systems with his then partner (and now ex-wife) Sandy Lerner. Their aim was to commercialize the Advanced Gateway Server.