Vendor lineage
Ungermann-Bass - the first company that only did networks
Ralph Ungermann left Zilog to build networks and nothing else, which nobody had done as a business before.
Founded in 1979, Ungermann-Bass is usually described as the first company whose entire business was computer networking rather than computers that happened to network. That is a real distinction: until then, networking was a feature sold by whoever made the machines, and a customer's options were bounded by their computer vendor.
It also opens the pattern this period is full of - founders who leave one company to start another and appear repeatedly across a decade. Ungermann came from Zilog, which he had co-founded after Intel. Reading the era as a sequence of firms misses that it is substantially the same population of people, recombining.
The company was eventually acquired by Tandem, which is the usual ending here and worth stating plainly rather than treating as failure: being bought is what success looked like for most of these firms.