William "Bill" Yeager (born June 16 1940, San Francisco) is an American engineer. He is best-known for his development of the first multiple-protocol router software while working at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Laboratory. The code was licenced by upstart Cisco Systems in 1987 and comprised the core of the first Cisco IOS. He is also known for his role in the creation of the IMAP mail protocol, and for writing the ttyftp serial line file transfer program, which was developed into the MacIntosh version of the Kermit (protocol) at Columbia University. He has also worked for NASA and Sun Microsystems. He is currently Chief Scientist at Peerouette, Inc^*.

He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964; his master's degree in mathematics from San Jose State University in San Jose, California, in 1976; and completed his doctoral course work at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1970. Then decided to abandon mathematics for a career in software engineering and research to the skepticism of his thesis advisor because Bill thought the future was in computing.

References

• Personal Server and network - Patent Application for Peerouette P2P Technology
• Global community naming authority - Patent Application for Peerouette P2P Technology
• Patent 6,167,402 - High Performance Message Store
• Patent 6,735,770 - Method and apparatus for high performance access to data in a message store
• Patent 6,418,542 - Critical signal thread
• Patent 6,457,064 - Method and apparatus for detecting input directed to a thread in a multi-threaded process
• Sun Microsystems biography
• "A start-up's true tale", Mercury News, 2001-01-12
• Interview at Networkworld.com

William Yeager