Bridge Communications - the box between the networks

Bridge Communications built terminal servers and internetworking gear in the early 1980s, in the window when local networks were multiplying faster than anyone could connect them to each other. It was one of the Ethernet companies that reached an initial public offering, which mattered more than it sounds: a balance sheet from an IPO was what allowed the Ethernet firms to cut prices aggressively while the token ring vendors could not.

In 1987 it merged into 3Com, in the same consolidation that saw Tandem Computers acquire Ungermann-Bass and Interlan absorbed into Micom. That clustering of dates is the fact worth recording: the independent local networking companies did not disappear one at a time over a decade, they were absorbed within roughly eighteen months of each other, because the market consolidated on a schedule set by prices falling faster than any of them could cut costs.

For 3Com the merger bought internetworking capability at exactly the moment the industry's centre of value was moving from cards and hubs to the boxes that joined networks together. Whether it bought enough is a different question, and the answer arrived later, when routing became a market Cisco defined rather than one 3Com competed in.