After 15 years, Paul Vixie and Stephen Stuart enticed me to leave Digital and move back to California from New Hampshire to join a startup. It was definitely a change of pace (and almost everything else) from Digital. My time at Vayu Communications can be divided into two halves:
For the first half of my employment we worked on an Internet Traffic Shaper. The idea was to give web clients the best performance for accessing web services by monitoring various statistics of TCP connections and redirecting you to the best ``mirror'' for it. Packeteer does something similar to what we were doing. But we missed the window so ...
The second half we took the knowledge we learned from implementing the Internet Traffic Shaper and applied/reworked the concepts to VoIP (Voice Over IP). We had a proprietary Quality of Service solution for VoIP but we were too far ahead of the curve. There was interest by some long distance carriers and carrier switch vendors but they didn't need the technology today and were hoping that Cisco, Lucent, ... would solve the problem by the time they needed to worry about it.
During the second half, I wrote a H.323 proxy which included a partial H.323 gatekeeper and learned H.323/H.245/H.225/Q.931 and found out that my DECnet/OSI background wasn't entirely worthless. But it was strange to come from Digital UNIX and OpenVMS and move to Solaris and Windows NT. The same only different. However VxWorks was new to me (but a little reminisent to the RSX-11S in my background). I was the network protocol and kernel person (not surprising since those are among my strengths).
So ends Vayu Communcations. Even though it didn't pan out, I don't have any regrets. I spent a year or so working on challenging stuff with interesting people and did things completely new to me.