cisco systems was founded in december 1984 by leonard bosack and sandy lerner, two stanford university computer scientists. they pioneered the concept of a local area network (lan) being used to connect geographically disparate computers over a multiprotocol router system. by the time the company went public in 1990, cisco had a market capitalization of $224 million. by the end of the dot-com bubble in the year 2000, cisco had a more than $500 billion market capitalization.