Color me impressed, This channel silently teaching you basic networking skills whilst telling a story and keeping it interesting.

Showing a Firepower firewall as a "better" and "More Advanced" device was a bold choice. All joking aside, this is an excellent and very informative video. Thank you!

I remember before NAT firewalls really caught on in the mid/late 90's, people just connected their computer straight to the internet via a modem. You could scan whole blocks of public subnets for open port 139 and just straight connect to //i.p.address/c$ without a password. It was the wild west. Also there were alternatives to the PIX firewall in the form of linux distributions.

In the early 2000s I worked for a small security firm and we bought a Cisco PIX as our network firewall, later replaced with an ASA. I never knew the history of this device. Thank you 🌷 really cool you got to talk to the people who invented NAT/PIX

Thanks for providing more of the back story of the NAT. I first discovered NATs in late 1994 when I was commuting to Microsoft (Boston Redmond) and used a NAT to allow all the home devices on my home network to share a single connection to the Internet. My vision was to have every home interconnected as a peer with the rest of the Internet. That idea goes back to the 1970s when I first learned about the 32-bit IP address and realized it was not enough for the connected future that was obvious then. It also means you can have stable addresses within the home separate from those outside. I then worked to make sure that all Windows machines were ready for home networking by putting IP (with DHCP) and NATs in every Windows machine. It turned out that an external box worked better, but those NATs are still there, and you can use them for the hotspot feature. Using the NAT as a firewall was an unfortunate kludge necessitated because Windows apps at the time were not prepared to face the world. My plan was to turn NATs into (encrypted) V6 routers and remove the firewall so all devices could be full participants. The goal was to enable connectivity without installers or professional network management. I wrote about this in rmf.vc/IEEEHomeNAT and have come to realize that V6 doesn't solve the problem of providing long-term table peer relationships because it is still in the access framing (nor does the DNS /rmf.vc/ForeverURLS). The idea of accessing the Internet is a misunderstanding, but that's a whole topic in its own right. As an FYI, much of my thinking about this goes back to my experience in class in the Spring of 1973 when we studied radio packet networks (ALOHANet) and in which Bob Metcalfe did Ethernet as his class project.

Excellent video. I hit pause and froze for about two minutes when you said duck pond and the image went to the Palo Alto Duck Pond. It was on the drive to there in 1981 that as a pre-teen I figured out how to use SIN and COS functions with an additional SIN to graph out a 3D perspective view of a drop making ripples in the surface of a pond. Back in those days the overwhelming majority of the people on the Internet were in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the mid 1980s a friend of a friend at NASA Ames was having an argument with someone in Australia on IRC and he got so mad that he ended up unplugging the cable that literally connected Australia to the Internet. 😂

The unintended effect of NAT and firewall devices has been that the focus of ICT security landed on the shoulders of network engineers whereas it ought have landed on the shoulders of systems and application engineers. It also slowed down the adoption of IPv6. Nevertheless a great piece of engineering of course. 😊

As someone who still remembers when the internet was just email, Usenet News, file transfer and Gopher, thank you for documenting and sharing this crucial innovation for networking. It's humbling when you think how just a few individuals with bright ideas saved our whole system from imminent collapse.

it's interesting how shockingly forward thinking they were. In the ninties 'hey we're gonna run out of address space at some point we should, uh, get on finding a fix before that becomes a problem.' In other sectors you'd get: 'how many addresses do we have right now?' 'Four billion but-' 'we'll never use up all that address space. stop wasting my time.'

Thank you for documenting history like these advances in networking. Jason Scott has said that most of the people he interviewed for the BBS documentary have now passed away. If these stories are not preserved, they fade and the past becomes inaccessible to the future; an unfortunate casualty of time. Thanks again! 😊

It's Cisco Live this week, and this would make an amazing presentation for the newer generation of network engineers. You should submit this as talk. Incredibly well done! Also, as a NetApp veteran, thanks for the hat tip mention there!

These men & women are the non-well-known heroes of our current information age and many of them are still alive, this is so fantastic, thanks for interviewing them!

I started doing NAT on Linux in late 1995, I had no idea NAT was only a year old by then.

This was great! The number of PIX and ASA devices I've worked on over the years is staggering.

Please do more network history videos! All retro tech videos are usually systems and rarely networking and I'm endlessly curious how everything came to be as a Network engineer myself

As cool as the technology itself is, I really do wish NAT didn't happen. It broke connectivity for at least years, and IPv6 was around for the entire time. Broken SIP, broken STUN, broken FTP, and even today Uno on Steam *still* doesn't work properly over NAT. To this day ISPs keep putting more bandaids on to keep IPv4 around, and have even monetized addresses resulting in virtual hosting being commonplace (sharing domains on one public IP). NAT would've happened, in some capacity, probably, but introducing it set IPv6 back for decades.

I worked from about 2001 to 2016 using various Pix devices, including 501, 506, 515E and the Cisco ASA line. I never knew this history though, what a fun video!

13:20 Its a FAServer! I know this! Thanks for the shout-out. Great video!

Never thought I would see trumpet winsock ever again, that brings back memories.

I never realised how relatively recently NAT was invented. What a great video 👍

I worked for the Colorado company eSoft, which released a NAT firewall in 1995 called the IPAD, short for Internet Protocol Adapter. In addition to NAT and DHCP, it also had POP3, SMTP, HTTP, and FTP servers. Like the PIX, it had a proprietary OS written in C and used off-the-shelf X86 hardware. A few small ISPs are using IPADs today.

I'd note that in the late 90's there were software products for Windows and Linux that could do NAT services for you. Personally I used Winroute on windows until it didn't combine properly anymore with the fileserver role on the same host. Linux had IPchains to do NAT on kernel 2.2, and eventually got Netfilter near the end of the 90's. Of course Cisco sold a lot of pix appliances, but NAT as a concept was already pretty popular and implemented in many places that didn't really need any cisco equipment (yet).

My dad worked as a Project Manager at Cisco Systems for 15 years, I remember when he retired because all of their jobs were being sent overseas. This was around 2005 I believe. I miss the days when I'd get to go to work with him as a kid. Those were good times...

I find these early "Internet" stories more interesting than what we have today, honestly. Very fascinating story to listen to.

Great history! I went to university in 1990 and they had internet. Apart from telnet, ftp, usenet, we used it for online gaming, like MUDs, and chats, like IRC and Relay, and X-Win for remote windows. For search engines, we had "Archie" and "Veronica". Not exactly the stoneage. And we had "Gopher" which came out before the "Word Wide Web". It was similar, except every page had strict formatting. Once the WWW came out, it was better for sure. Really the main difference back then was it was mostly schools and gov on the internet. It wasnt until AOL decided to add a portal to the internet around 95 that it really exploded, and then suddenly everyone wanted in.

Got a PIX when first got a DSL line way back when. I never knew how revolutionary that device was. Very fun to know more about its history.

Fun story. I am on the verge of sunsetting a bunch of 5585x pairs ...moving on to NG2FWs. I had first touched a PIX in 1998 but never bothered to understand the whole story. Remember in the old days you would use a PIX and a 3005 VPN Concentrator (or bigger) because until the ASA came out you needed both of them. Very touching as I have basically been working on every generation since (with a little Fortinet and PA in there).

In the 80s I made a big miscalculation, thinking internet wouldn't be so big, even till today I have problems understanding some features in networking as a whole. But these days there is AI that helps me to get huge info about the subject. I have some hardware NATs running here, and now I can fine tune them with this acknowledge.

Earlier in my IT career I've managed PIX and ASA devices. I used a smaller ASA in my home network for a bit. Never knew it was an acquisition by Cisco and it was the first NAT device. It's pretty neat how NTI followed NetApp's business model in making a purpose built appliance.

As someone that grew up with dialup pre web found this history so interesting. I knew about PIX and NAT but had no idea where it came drin, especially prior to Cisco. Thank you for this very informative video.

The first firewall I recommended and setup was a 515e with warm standby. Rock solid. Kept it far too long (10 years). I compare any firewall I setup to those old PIXs, and many modern ones still fall short.

I’ve been using “the internet” since the 80s. In the late 80s I was primarily only concerned with connecting to BBS sources. I was only a kid so I didn’t have any “professional” interests in the internet at the time but I was extremely interested in learning about it. I remember reading about IP address exhaustion and started to hear things about NAT. I lived in Redwood City at the time so it didn’t take long for information to make its way to me. No, we couldn’t do Google searches back then. We had to actually talk to people. Like anyone who had any level of foresight at that time, I envisioned how the concept of personal computing was going to change things. So I dropped out of high school and started my path to my “IT” career (a term that didn’t exist back then). After working in various computer related fields (mostly doing dial up and DSL tech support)I eventually landed a job as an engineer at the first cable broadband internet service provider in the US, “@Home”, in Redwood City. Eventually @Home and Excite.com (the #2 search engine at the time, behind Yahoo) merged and gave me access to their datacenters. It was then that I had seen the true impact of how NAT truly helped the internet become what it was. Buildings upon buildings full of servers and network appliances, all running on IP networks. I can’t imagine the management nightmare that would be, especially when talking about Layer 3 and 4 security, if NAT didn’t exist. Not to mention all of the workstations for all of the users employed at the company. It was very interesting to see that evolution happen. I learned so much while being a part of that era. I sometimes miss it (I don’t do that type of work anymore) but I know that there’s bound to be something innovative come down the pipeline again and I hope to be around to see it.

Thanks for highlighting the people who made the internet work! I think many technology entrepreneurs get overlooked by a few popular figures who, while their products have greatly shaped the face of technology, ignore the fact there were so many more who go thankless except among the technology nerds. For every one Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, there's a dozen more computer greats who deserve more credit. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and many many others are names the average person on the street wouldn't be able to name or say what their contribution was. So I love reading and seeing videos about the unsung heroes, the people whose inventions make the modern world work, and with out them you wouldn't be able to even use the creations of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

An awesome and uplifting story. Thank you! It's great to know this amazing story. Now wishing I'd kept my PIX 501 from years ago.

I started with networking while in university in the 2000s and got my first job in 2007. PIX firewalls were already considered obsolete at that time and ASAs were where it was at. I never knew how pioneering the device actually was, it seemed clunky to use to me (as it used a different command line than IOS) and I didn't like it. So you just made me appreciate the device I once disliked.

Superbly informative video. My whole networking career has known NAT. I am sitting here almost stunned that there was a time before NAT. But of course there was such a time and, thankfully, there were also Engineers with the vision and ability to invent NAT!

I lived and worked through this era and worked directly with TCP/IP. This is a great story of what was going on to solve this impending crisis. The best channel.

I installed dozens of Cisco PIX and many dozens (in the hundreds?) of Cisco ASAs. Huge part of my IT history. Way back in the day (2000?) there was even a CCNP Firewall cert that was basically just the CCNP plus one more Firewall cert. I didn't even study for the test, I just went and sat for it and passed with flying colors.

What a great video! A truly fascinating history behind something we all use every day but mostly take for granted.

One of the healthcare technology companies I worked for actually had machines with the NTI logos on the front. Surprisingly they were only fully retired in 2017. (Yep they were only like 15 years past EOL…and yep there were still NT 4.0 boxes too) Back in the day the fun thing would be that you would walk into companies that just made up ip addresses (usually in the low end class A’s or using repeat numbers like 111). They would come in and hook up a network connection and randomly wipe people off the internet (in many cases government agencies who had low class A octet numbers). There wasn’t really any protection against customers asking their network provider from routing any random ip space to them….they were supposed to do some checks but few bothered doing it all the time.

First off, the 32 bit address space was never intended to be public. IPv4 was just supposed to be for concept demonstration and the final version was supposed to have a much larger address space. However, it "escaped". This according to Vint Cerf, one of the creators of IP. Second, originally there weren't address classes, the entire address space was what eventually called class A. See RFC 760 for details. It provided for 8 bit network addresses and 24 bit host addresses. NAT has become a curse on the Internet in that it breaks things and also there are many people who are stuck behind carrier grade NAT and so don't even get a single public address. This makes it impossible for them to directly access their network. Also, NAT does not provide any security that a properly configured firewall can't provide. Re "mini" computers. Many years ago, I was a computer tech, servicing among other computers, the DEC VAX 11/780, which was bigger than those IBM systems. My first Internet connection was in 1994, IIRC. It was so long ago that I had a SLIP connection, as PPP wasn't yet commonplace. This meant I had a static address, as SLIP didn't support automatic address assignment. I have been running IPv6 on my home network for 13 years, initially via a 6in4 tunnel, but for over 7 year with native IPv6 from my ISP. I also have IPv6 on my cell phone. Also, in the late 90s, I was at IBM Canada, providing 3rd level OS/2 support. Back then I had 5 static public IPv4 addresses, 1 for my own computer and 4 for testing in my work. Back then DHCP was just starting to be used. I also had 5 SNA addresses there. This was on a token ring network.

As an IT consultant who started in the late 90's, I deployed many of these and supported and configured many more.

I used a Cisco PIX 515 to get my CISSP. I still have it (not in use but on a shelf) and is one of my most prized possessions. Good video!!

Cool, I worked on ARPA after being in the Army as a contractor. Went to work after with the University of California in the early 90's. Worked with the Cisco AGS routers on up to current. Back when they had a phone book for people and their emails. Loved the time I had working with the systems and remember the NAT solution. Met some of these very influential people during my journey with CENIC and the University system. Ahh the days of Novell, Thicknet, IBM networks, stupid drivers for everything.. etc. LOL oh those were the days!

Great vid. Amazing how these early pioneers made such a difference to the web's survival. We should all be glad they cared. Even if only because it was for purely business reasons 😊

Great video! Blast from the past. My first PIX was the first model Cisco released. NAT and the firewall were very important as some of my systems were hacked. The danger of having everything with a publicly routable IP address! Good times!

Great story! I started with a Pix 520 in active/standby configuration around the 2000's. Great box, just before they were replaced I remember repairing one with a standard PC power supply.

KZfaq has been recommending this video to me for I think a few WEEKS now. The length of the video kept making me be like... "ehhh later". But now that I've watched it. SO GLAD I DID. And honestly so glad that KZfaq Algo beat me over the head with this video so many times. It's kind of unreal how actually good the KZfaq Algo is, at least in my opinion. Thanks for this video! Super neat! :D

Man I am jealous of that time. It seemed like more opportunities to do something huge. Now it is hard to find an idea that isn't already done or it is incredibly complicated.

What a wonderful video with impresive interviews. Good work. I hope that Paul Francis get an award for being a clever pariah.

Putting an home or office behind NAT isn’t much of a issue, but CG-NAT is a crime against the concept of Internet/broadband.

Awesome story, I remember installing a HA pair of PIX's at my Uni's CompSci department (where I was sysadmin), that must have been 1998 or 1999... That was really my first foray into enterprise networking - so some fond memories there... Thanks for this video :)

incredible to know how things were done in the begining, things like this explain why cisco is so important in so many fields, now all of us can enjoy the fruits of their efforts

In 1995 I invaded Bosnia as part of RFCT 1AD to stop the war there, marking and clearing active minefields as we went in. In 1996 while still on deployment we began running BNC cables, t-connectors, and terminators and wiring up the first ever "deployed" WAN network the DOD had ever done. I was running my normal [REDACTED] missions during the day and working on the network at night. Since I had experience with networks as a teen growing up in a small rural town in [REDACTED], I was "volunteered" to assist our commo guys with it. I thought it was neat and threw everything I had into it, usually only getting about 4 hours of sleep a night for an entire year. Without fail there was always one soldier that would unplug a terminator and crash the entire network causing us to have to walk every single run and look at every single t-connector. And what was handling all the traffic traffic for that collection of separate network messes scattered throughout the entire country? A single PIX with a pre-configured offline "spare" as an emergency backup. The whole thing was beautifully ugly but in typical Army fashion it actually worked and it worked well. We could start sending and receiving more documents over the network and rely less on a daily courier convoy that did nothing but shuttle paperwork between the various camps and FOBs. Altavista was the most-visited website back then, we were always using that search engine. That convoy would roll out HQs gate at 6am at full throttle and visit every single U.S. installation in the entire country, never letting up until they rolled back in the HQs gate around 6pm that night. Very dangerous work. I know. I drove a stripped-down humvee that was part of it for many months. The burnout was real. Later I would deploy to Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan and pretty much do the same thing but with the latest networking tech while still doing my regular day job of hunting bad guys. I'm one of the few still left alive on the planet that deployed to 4 different wars under 3 different Presidents, stringing up networks along the way.

arguably NAT and the PIX slowed the adoption of ipv6 as implementing NAT was way more cost effective than re-IPing every device.

What! I never thought that NAT was something that was invented as a cure to a problem as late as 1995. I always thought it had been a product of standarding body of some sort from early networking times. Thanks for making these videos.

It's almost annoying how well NAT works, because if it was any worse we wouldn't be more than 20 years into the existence of IPv6 and only at ~40% adoption. It's a very clever hack that was necessary at the time, and it has some uses that are more justifiable than others, but it was a mistake to ease up on IPv6 rollout when NAT is just a bandaid solution.

Great video format with this last video, in particular focusing on the evolution of the idea and its propagation and generalization to now ubiquity! Please keep them coming!

Great channel. As usual, the best way to wrap your head around a concept as bizarre as NAT, is to learn the history of how/why it came to exist in the first placd.

This is true history of the modern world and the engineers and all the teams who was there creating it, who started everything. Pure gold.

Thanks for doing this video! I got to work a bit with John Mayes while I was at Spectrum Holobyte, where he installed a PIX sometime in eairly to mid 1993. Good times to be in IT.

Sooo cool to see where comes Cisco ASA/FPR comes from ! I work with this kind of devices every day ! (And not Only Cisco). I truly appreciate the video !

I am so happy that I have found this channel. Having started back in the early 80's BBS days with my Atari, knowing that this history is being saved so those who come after know what we did to get here. Subscribed!

Great video! I installed dozens of PIX firewalls in the late 90's and early 2000's. The 515E was an "enhanced" version of the 515, and indeed the 515E was the last model. However, both the PIX and the 3000-series VPN concentrator (another Cisco acquisition whose name escapes me) were more or less combined to become the ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance), which was the successor to both products. The ASA 5505 more or less replaced the 515E, while the 5520 more or less replaced the larger PIX 520. With PIX at the heart of the ASA, it lived on for well in to the next decade. At least, that's my recollection :-)

It’s amazing to learn the behind the scenes of all the amazing things I lived through that I previously had no context for. Thank you.

great documentary with primary source interviews. thanks "the serial port" and thanks youtube algo for recommending me this.

Love your videos, thank you so much for the effort/content, it's really appreciated.

I started in the network industry in the late 80s onwards, and got to see all of these transformative changes. Nonetheless, there are details here I didn't know about... Thanks...

excellent video. very interesting to learn about early internet history like this, especially with the interviews. this channel is going to blow up!

15:32 I feel like I'd be the kind of person to tell the new intern that the turbo button is used to make the internet go faster. For those unaware, "Turbo" buttons on old systems actually slowed the processor down so older applications built for slower processors could run properly.

THANK YOU !! Fantastic insight for the younger generations… Where would we be today if NAT / DHCP / PIX / ETC had not been conceived of and implemented back in those “early days”? Hardly anyone involved with internet and telecommunications today, regardless of their age, seems to recall the early days of this field. While the power and phenomenal capabilities of the internet was there, it most certainly was not “user friendly”. Without the contributions of a few forward thinking and brilliant men, it would still be relegated to the educational & military realm.

NAT was the saver of the early internet, but it lives long enough to become the villain of the modern internet. It prevents IPv6 to become the new standard and it's the thing why we still use IPv4

This is such an interesting video. Great background about a network technologies(s) we (now) take for granted! Thank you producing such a great video!

What an awesome mini-documentary! Thanks so much for putting it together and looking forward to more!

You need a second channel called The Parallel Port.

what an awesome video! instant subscribe. i'm on the internet since 1995 and this hits all my sweet spots.... lol ,well played! :)

never knew that Nat was that much important it never fails to amaze me that how far Nat has come throughout the years from chunky server rack mounted system to our smartphones

This was a fantastic documentary, informational and entertaining at the same time!

This is one of the rare times that I initially didn't want click the recommendation as being suspect for click bait that it wasn't.

Honestly as much I rag on Cisco for their firewalls the contribution of the PIX can’t be ignored. What’s sad is they took a good stateful firewall and threw firepower on it and called it good meanwhile Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Checkpoint just ate their lunch. I’m a Palo Alto / Fortinet person myself but I still run ASA’s at a few sites and they do make good VPN concentration points / interior firewalls.

Thank you, KZfaq Algorithm. I've never come across this channel before, but what an excellent first video to watch

I was in college in the late 90s and I had several Linux boxes, but dorm network only provided me one IP. So I built up a linux box with IP Masquerading to get all my machines connected to the Internet.

Wow this brought me a lot of nostalgia from the 90s, thank you! :-) It was fun back then...

Thanks for making this video. I was working on Linux networking stack from late 1992 and didn't know some of this history.

In addition to this the ubiquity of Ethernet (one LAN to serve all) and switching with Layer 3 and VLANs allowed plug and play scaling and segmentation beyond the prior methods. Cisco's IOS Operating System and its Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) allowed disparate boxes to act as one, propagating configuration information automatically. This made it so you did not need to login to each box and set common items up again. And of course in time this management moved beyond IOS, CDP and SNMP and into the Cloud and much more welcoming GUIs.

Wow! Such a great and informative video! You obviously put a lot of thought and effort into making this video.

The Winsock screen hit home hard ! My first time accessing Internet was in about 1997 through BBS and I used to use that very same Winsock to connect a dial up model (first 33600kbs and them 56000bps and after that ins the early 2000 I went broadband over phone line but it did not block the phone line as the dial ups did, a huge leap forward)

@8:26 The mini in minicomputer only kind-of-sort-of referred to the size of the computer. Back in the day, there were pretty much three types of computers: mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Mainframes were expensive and could possibly fill a room. Minicomputers were smaller, cheaper, and had less computing power than a mainframe. Microcomputers were smaller, cheaper, and had less computing power than a minicomputer. We don't really call machines minicomputers or microcomputers anymore since that line has blurred. At some point, the industry stopped calling them minicomputers and started calling them servers. The industry also stopped using the term microcomputer and further subdivided that class of computer further: workstation is expensive and powerful, PC is not as expensive and less powerful, etc.,

I worked on several clients networks in the 98-99 timeframe and used Cisco 2xxx routers with dual Ethernet lan/wan to give their whole networks internet access using Nat. It was a PIA to set that up in IOS via command line back in those days. People today don’t know how much we all suffered back in those days when they plug in their $29 netgear router and it does the same thing plus has Wi-Fi. Much less expensive than the $2000 or so that we spent in the late 90s for the same capability

I'm into computers and networking and this was a very well enjoyed story. Thank you so much.

Working at a startup tech company back in the 90s had to be a real treat.

It really was an interesting time when adoption of the Internet began to shake things up. I remember when NAT was being put forward but then also hearing from the other side of the community who were heavily against it. An almost religious-like description of the resistance to it is spot on.

Wonderful presentation, amazing interview This is the kind of video that i gladly want to watch on KZfaq Also, I really love the fact that you really interviewed the legendary person himself One unfortunate thing is that my pitiful English skill cannot deliver how grateful I am. Please keep up the good work :)

Factual mistake: NAT was never supposed to be a security feature. I can imagine it was originally a selling point for PIX to picture NAT as a security feature. However, network & security people in 2023 will all agree that its simply not true. But because this misleading quote is so deeply circulating even among tech people, it will take ages until it dies out. Similar to other non-true "axiom" like the "internet routing was architected that redundant way to survive nuclear attack" which was also debunked by many.

This is so cool, I love the history of early computing. We really had to work hard and get creative and make really good designs.

Thank you for shading lights on those who pushed humanity centuries ahead to the feature!

This was way more interesting than I expected, and I expected it to be interesting. Great work.

Makes me think about the intricacies how modern networks work. There's crazy workarounds that very intelligent people have come up with to solve problems in IPv4 networking. Interesting watch.

This was insanely interesting and in-depth about a device/topic we take for granted today.

Thanks for putting together such a well structured video, especially with the interviews!