Leonard Bosack (Born in 1952) along with his wife Sandy Lerner, is a co-founder of Cisco Systems, an American-based multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking and communications technology and services. 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 unheard of technology at the time. In 1990, Cisco's management fired his wife Sandy Lerner, and Bosack resigned. Bosack is currently the CEO of XKL LLC, a privately funded engineering company which explores and develops optical networks for data communications.
Sandy Lerner (born in 1955) received her bachelor's degree in 1975 in political science from California State University, Chico, a master's degree in econometrics in 1977 from the Claremont Graduate School, and a master's degree in statistics and computer science in 1981 from Stanford University.
In 1984, Sandy Lerner cofounded Cisco Systems with her then boyfriend, and now ex-husband, Len Bosack, while working as Director of Computer Facilities for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
It is widely reported that Lerner and Bosack designed the first router so that they could connect the incompatible computer systems of the Stanford offices they were working in so that they could send romantic love letters to each other. However, this was a manufactured corporate legend. In fact, both systems (SU-SCORE and SU-GSB) were TOPS-20 systems. The problem was not that the systems were incompatible (obviously, being the same, they were not), but that the SU-GSB system was not on any network.
It has also been noted that the original router was designed and created by a group of people at Stanford, both students and faculty, rather than Lerner and Bosack alone.