FORE Systems was a

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

switching equipment company based in

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

. Founded in 1990 to supply

Asynchronous Transfer Mode Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ITU-T (formerly CCITT) for digital transmission of multiple types of traffic. ATM was developed to meet the needs of ...

(ATM) cards for

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workst ...

computers, it soon branched out to become a major supplier in the ATM switch market and the extended those product lines to add

Internet Protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. ...

switching and other devices. FORE was purchased by the British

General Electric Company The General Electric Company (GEC) was a major British industrial conglomerate involved in consumer and defence electronics, communications, and engineering. The company was founded in 1886, was Britain's largest private employer with over 250 ...

(GEC) in 1999, just before the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...

, which eventually drove GEC to reform the company as Marconi.

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in inform ...

purchased most of Marconi in 2006.

History

Francois Bitz, Onat Menzilcioglu, Robert Sansum and Eric Cooper were researchers at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

who felt their 1989 project to supply a

US Naval Research Lab The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It was founded in 1923 and conducts basic scientific research, applied research, technological ...

oratories Request for Development had commercial potential. They formed FORE, using the first letter of their first names, in 1990 in the

suburb of Warrendale, Pennsylvania. The company went public in May 1994. FORE initially produced

(ATM) network interface cards for

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

' SBus and DEC's

TURBOchannel TURBOchannel is an open computer bus developed by DEC by during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although it is open for any vendor to implement in their own systems, it was mostly used in Digital's own systems such as the MIPS-based DECstation ...

based computers in addition to ATM adapters for

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

computers. FORE's first ATM switch – the ASX-100 – connected sixteen ATM ports each with a capacity of 155.52 Mbit/s. Later interface adapters for the follow-on ASX-200, ASX-1000, and ASX-4000 switches allowed connections up to 2.5 Gbit/s. The company established a leading position in the market for ATM switching equipment. FORE created a memory-based ATM switch that captured a strong portion of the ATM market. Other technologies include

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use ...

and

Firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

switching. FORE Systems also supported advanced dynamic routing protocols such as the ForeThought Private Network Network Interface (PNNI) and the

ATM Forum The ATM Forum was founded in 1991 to be the industry consortium to promote Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology used in telecommunication networks; the founding president and chairman was Fred Sammartino of Sun Microsystems. It was a non-profit in ...

's PNNI protocol. FORE was acquired by London-based GEC (now Marconi Corporation plc) on 26 April 1999 to complement its

Marconi Communications Marconi Communications, the former telecommunications arm of Britain's General Electric Company plc (GEC), was founded in August 1998 through the amalgamation of GEC Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) with other GEC subsidiaries: Marconi SpA, GE ...

business and to increase its presence in North America, the world's largest telecoms market. This was near the peak of the

. The £2.8bn (US$4.5bn) ($ billion today) price tag for FORE and the £1.3n spent on Reltec a month earlier took a heavy toll on Marconi following the burst of the bubble in 2000/2001. In July 2001 Marconi plc suffered a 54% drop in its share price following suspension of trading of its shares, a profits warning and redundancies. The company survived following a relaunch as Marconi Corporation plc in a debt-for-equity swap whereby the firm’s creditors received 99.5% of the new company’s shares. In 2006, Ericsson purchased most of Marconi, including the part that used to be FORE Systems. In 2008, Ericsson closed the Warrendale plant and sold off the corporate HQ.

Acquisition history

1999
''Euristix Ltd.'', a telecommunications software company based in Dublin, Ireland for $81 million. Euristix delivered network management and Intelligent Networking software expertise. 1998
''

Berkeley Networks Berkeley Networks was a leading startup company that built intelligent switches targeted for the enterprise computer networking market segment. The company was established in 1996. The name of the company comes from the school; University of Calif ...

Inc.'' Fore Systems Inc. acquired the closely held Berkeley Networks Inc. for $250 million in stock and cash, acquiring equipment that speeds data on computer networks run by Microsoft's Windows NT software. Fore, the No. 7 maker of networking equipment, issued 8.48 million shares for all the shares of Berkeley Net. 1996
''Scalable Networks Inc.'' FORE Systems Inc. acquired Scalable Networks Inc., an O'Hara Township, Pennsylvania developer of high-performance technology used to access asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks for about $34 million. The deal adds a line of local area network (LAN) equipment to FORE's product line and is likely to enhance the company's position in the global ATM market. 1995
''Alantec Inc.'' FORE Systems Inc. acquired Alantec Inc. for about $768 million. Alantec, a San Jose, California manufacturer of

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

and FDDI switching hubs, provided

IEEE 802 IEEE 802 is a family of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for local area networks (LAN), personal area network (PAN), and metropolitan area networks (MAN). The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee (LMSC) maintai ...

Ethernet to ATM aggregation. 1995
''Applied Network Technology, Inc.'' FORE Systems Inc. acquired Applied Network Technology Inc. for about $35 million. ANT, a Westford, Massachusetts manufacturer of

and

Fast Ethernet In computer networking, Fast Ethernet physical layers carry traffic at the nominal rate of 100 Mbit/s. The prior Ethernet speed was 10 Mbit/s. Of the Fast Ethernet physical layers, 100BASE-TX is by far the most common. Fast Ethern ...

switching hubs, provided high density/low cost

Ethernet to ATM aggregation.

References

External links

Ericsson Buys Marconi: $2.1BBBC News: GEC spends billions on US Internet group
* ttps://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5DB153CF935A1575BC0A96E958260 Fore Systems Acquires Berkeley Networks Inc.br>Fore Systems Acquisition of AlantecFore Systems Acquisition of Applied Network Technology Inc.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fore Systems Defunct networking companies Defunct computer hardware companies

History

Acquisition history

See also

References

External links