This is something I wrote for Eman's e magazine ( if you are a CCIE, you should know him ).
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Stuart Biggs - our beloved friend
- A message from his family in Cisco
Stuart Biggs is known all over the world for being the first human to have CCIE#. Every CCIE has a story to tell on how they got the #, Stuart has his own.
Stuart, the CCIE:
Biggs, California, is a small railroad stop along Highway 99 in California’s Central Valley region that might see 100 people pass through it on a busy day. Stuart's great great grandfather built a rice farm there and the town grew up around it. The family continued to farm in the valley for the generations that followed, and Stuart spent summers as a kid picking prunes and peaches in his father’s orchards. Stuart’s first job was building stepping stones, which he describes as "kind of warm work" in those baking Central Valley summers, but he dreamed of building other things, like hardware—or writing software—or even flying into space. He certainly never dreamed at the time that he might help invent a key stepping stone to engineering excellence—the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) program. Stuart, who received bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, worked at a startup, 3Com and then Synoptics, before joining Cisco in 1992. He continued to teach classes, such as one at 3Com called "3Wizard," but felt that the written tests were not challenging enough, as everything asked could be gleaned from the class materials.
The year he joined Cisco, Stuart trained Ford’s IT team in Dearborn, Michigan, on Cisco’s hottest networking products and solutions at the time. When the team asked for more hands-on work with the company’s hardware, Stuart presented a lab session the engineers never forgot—a jumbled mess of routers, jumpers and cables on a table that they must piece together to match a diagram on a whiteboard, in one day. A few months later, Stuart organized a team that would create a "base of expertise" on Cisco products for customers who could mostly maintain their own networks, or at least help Cisco maintain them. While all part of an effort to ease the burgeoning workload of the company’s 60-to-80 support engineers at the time, without realizing it, the team was forming the early CCIE.The team decided to start CCIE certification numbers at 1024 (2 to the power of 10). They awarded 1024 to the original lab and Stuart got 1025 (by chance, the same number as his employee ID) and Terry, 1026. Through subsequent years, other Cisco teams have evolved the certification process over the years, making it more and more challenging
Stuart's CCIE had since lapsed, but he still considered rectifying.. He said if he worked more 'hands on' with the equipment on a daily basis, he would for sure. Stuart enjoyed the country life he experienced as a boy. He lived on 5 acres about 50 miles north of Sacramento, California, with his wife Kim and 26 animals: cats, dogs, sheep, horses, rabbits, a llama, a cow and a bird.
"I am amazed how well this program has grown," he said recently. "2013 will be the 20th year of this program—and people still take notice when someone says they are a CCIE!"
Stuart, the friend:
Stuart was known to be a very humble, down to earth, supportive, encouraging and helpful among his fellow team members. To us, he was a man with abundant love and surrounded by love.
He was always extremely forthcoming in solving customer issues, would invite customers for an immediate wireshark webex session. He used to tell amusing stories such as Steve Jobs visiting his electronics store (long before his Cisco days) with a pitch to sell his Macintosh computer.
Firm handshake, wearing T-shirts with geeky sentences like "My mind works like a lightning! One brilliant flash and then it is gone!", relentless double and triple email replies and prompt humor emails to team on Friday evenings, ending his emails with a "Be well Sir!"…were all his trademarks.
Some of his recent words shared by team,
"Life is good. I have no complaints. I have a great wife, loads of animals I adore and a job!And valentine’s day is in a week!"
"I cry when my wife goes out of town!! :- )"
"Oh, My daughter lives in L.A. – about an 8 hr drive away – but sometimes she sends text messages to my wife in the middle of the night – which triggers my wife’s cell phone with a loud ring tone – thus waking me up. It’s like a 450 mile away baby monitor! :- )"
We will miss you Stuart. Rest in peace.
-His family in Cisco
