Charles Spurgeon is a co-author of the book “Ethernet – The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition”
He is a former Senior Technology Architect for the ITS Networking group at the University of Texas at Austin, who is currently semi-retired. He has been involved in developing and managing large campus computer networks for many years. Charles got his first email account on UT Austin mainframes in 1979, and his first Unix account (Berkeley Software Distribution v4.0 for the VAX) while working at Stanford University in 1981.
At Stanford, Charles worked with a group at SUMEX-AIM (Stanford University Medical EXperimental computing–Artificial Intelligence in Medicine) that created the first version of an internet router, which was developed by multiple groups at Stanford and used to build the campus network.
An internet router is a device used to route packets of data around a network system. The data in those packets make up the content shown in Web browsers, the audio in Internet phone calls, or the video display for streaming video and movies, making routers essential to the operation of complex networks and the worldwide Internet. The Stanford prototype router became the originating product of a startup company called cisco Systems (the lowercase “c” is not a typo).
Cisco grew into a company that spelled its name with a capital letter and developed many networking devices. However, Charles never worked at Cisco. Instead, he returned to UT Austin in the late 1980s, where he worked as the network architect, building and managing a rapidly growing campus network at one of the largest research universities in the country.