The man who led the team that created the CCIE program has died at the age of 53. Stuart Biggs was CCIE #1025 He was a technological genius who helped to develop Cisco’s first company website and world renowned CCIE certification program
At first it was going to be called Cisco Top Gun but then later changed to Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert.
An extract from a post Stuart Biggs made about this last year is below
One of the goals of this team was to create a course that would focus on expertise on Cisco products in a real live environment. We wanted to fill in the gaps that the 3Com course left out. The written exam was an afterthought – just to set a bar for admission to the lab exam. Before I forget to mention this fact, the original name of the program was going to be ‘Cisco Top Gun’ – but as that famous Tom Cruise movie with the same name had recently come out, we figured there may be some legal issues in using that name – so we chose ‘Cisco Certified Internet Expert’
We created a lab – it was a bit adhoc – but matched the technology of the early 90’s – FDDI, Ethernet, maybe a bit of X.25 as well as IBM SNA and 1 or 2 routing protocols, oh and I can’t forget – Token ring. Those were the ingredients of the day.
So we created a written exam and used that as the ‘filter’ to folks going to the lab. The first person outside of Cisco to take the written was a guy named Terry Slattery. He’s a very nice guy who till this day still holds his CCIE certification (#1026). I was the first lab proctor and messed with the cables, jumpers and all manner of things in order to break the lab setup for Terry. Back in those days, it was pretty easy to mess with a cable or fiddle with jumpers on the various boards or interface cards. So I drew a network on a whiteboard – much like the earlier days with Ford – as to how the network should work and walked out of the room. Terry quite handily sorted things out thus becoming the 2nd CCIE in the world – 1st outside of Cisco.
“Stuart was a tenure employee with Cisco Systems with over 20 years of service. He was a technological genius who helped to develop Cisco’s first company website and world renowned CCIE certification program. Most recently, Stuart was awarded a US Patent for the development of a computer network application. He will be truly missed by his Cisco Family.”
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/appealdemocrat/obituary.aspx?n=stuart-edward-biggs
Why do the CCIE numbers start at 1025?
You may or may not be wondering why Terry was CCIE 1025 and not CCIE number 1.
The reason is that Cisco decided to make the Lab CCIE 1024 and made the plaque and hung it above the original Lab.
The reason for 1024 2^10So the CCIE Lab was actually CCIE 1024 and the first person to become a CCIE was Terry at CCIE#1025
With the numbers well over 40,000 now the CCIE is still a very popular program.
