How it started
History
InterWorking Labs was co-founded in 1993 by Chris Wellens and Marshall Rose. The two met in 1992 at the Interop Company, in Mountain View, California, where Wellens was Director of Technology and Rose was on the Interop Program Committee and also Working Group Chair of the IETF for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).
Wellens—who was overseeing the trade fair's 5000-node InteropNet as well as an array of interoperability demonstrations for network protocols— noticed that engineers from different companies often interpreted network protocols differently and ended up struggling to make their products send and receive data to one another—sometimes just minutes before showcase demonstrations. The engineers asked Interop to create an interoperability lab where these network communication issues could be worked out in a private and less stressful environment. Interop's founder and CEO Dan Lynch concluded that the industry needed an interoperability testing lab.
Lynch asked Wellens to write a business plan for a permanent Interoperability Lab. Rose proposed that the Lab's first task should be to create and try out a set of tests of the SNMP protocol, since SNMP was an area he was familiar with and one where engineers were having particular problems at Interop. Wellens volunteered to organize a group of developers for an interoperability test summit if Rose would create a set of tests and assist in developing the initial plan.
At about the same time, however, Ziff-Davis acquired Interop and chose not to proceed with the Interoperability Lab. Wellens and Lynch agreed that she should pursue the idea on her own. In 1993, Wellens established InterWorking Labs, and, in January 1994, organized the first SNMP interoperability test summit using 50 SNMP tests written by Rose. During that first test summit, a large number of implementations failed Rose's tests. The results persuaded several major corporations that interoperability testing would be a critical component of functioning networks. Participants at the second (1994) SNMP Test Summit included Cabletron Systems, Cisco Systems, Eicon Technology, Empirical Tools and Technologies, Epilogue Technology Corp., Fujitsu OSSI, IBM and IBM Research, Network General Corp., PEER Networks, SNMP Research, SynOptics Communications, TGV, Inc., and Wellfleet Communications.
In 2000, Wellens asked Karl Auerbach to join the InterWorking Labs Board of Directors. In 2002, Wellens hired Auerbach, who was part of Cisco's Advanced Internet Architecture group, to serve as chief technology officer at InterWorking Labs. An advisory board consisted of several members of the IETF who have expertise in networking protocols (Andy Bierman, Jeff Case, Dave Perkins, Randy Presuhn, and Steve Waldbusser).
From Wikipedia’s article on InterWorking Labs, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2