History of the PIX Firewall

The Cisco PIX firewall is a well known network address location appliance, and one of the earliest firewalls available. Although the PIX firewall has been largely replaced by the ASA, it is still used in the Catalyst 6500 designed by Cisco, as well as the 7600 series of routers. PIX was first invented by John Mayes and Brantley Coile who provided the code in 1994. It received its name because its creators were attempting to create an alternative to the IP PBX because at the time there was a registered IP address shortage. The design of the product and testing of the code was carried out by a small team with Brantley Coile acting as the only software developer for the project.

Customer acceptance began December 21, 1994 in California. The PIX firewall was an instant success becoming one of the most popular firewall products on the market. It even won the “Hot product of the year” award from Data Communications Magazine in 1995. The Finesse OS was the original PIX firewall created by Brantley and his Associates when Cisco acquired Network Translation later that year. From 1997 to 2000 PIX was even sold along with the Windows based Cisco Centri Firewall. Coile would later found his own company in 1997 and developed ATA over Ethernet.

Originally titled Finesse, Fast Internet Server Executive, the PIX firewall operation system is now simply titled the PIX OS. It always allows outbound traffic and inbound traffic is allowed only in case of a valid request or by an ACL or conduit. PIX can perform many different functions when properly configured, and was the first firewall to feature protocol specific filtering. The 501 and 506E models were released only recently and feature PIX firewall memory of only 8 MB. Because of this it cannot support version 7.x. The PIX firewall memory of the PIX 515(E) requires double the memory for restricted (32 increased to 64) and Unrestricted/Failover licenses (64 increased to 128).

The PIX firewall features some complicated hardware and is constructed using Intel or Intel compatible motherboards. Most use Ethernet NIC's with Intel chips but the older models will utilize a various selection of other Ethernet devices. The PIX classic also features a proprietary ISA PIX firewall memory daughter-card and the more recent models boot off of integrated PIX firewall memory. In 2008 Cisco ended the life of the product for all Cisco PIX Security Appliances. The PIX firewall broke a lot of ground and is still used today due to its many positive attributes.