It all started with a man and a Master's thesis.
Like many great ideas, GNS3 began in a dorm room in 2006. Jeremy Grossmann was working on his Master's thesis – an arduous undertaking that could have shackled him to a computer lab for two years.
Until, in a flurry of croissants and French press coffee, he hit on something big. Something that would allow him to test and design networks anywhere in the world: GNS3. It was the kind of idea that makes people do crazy things, and for Jeremy, that was packing everything up and moving to Canada.
It's alive.
From our new home in the great white north, GNS3 started to grow. Our open source model and intuitive interface made us a favorite of students training for their network certifications and network professionals working for some of the biggest companies around. In just a few years, we went from a school project to a thriving community of over 2 million users. But we wanted to make it better...
All for one, and one for multi-vendor environments and switching functionality.
We asked all of our friendly neighborhood network professionals what they'd like to see in the new GNS3 and launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring our collective baby kicking and screaming into the world. Thanks to the generosity of our community, we raised over $600,000. So we put on a fresh pot of coffee, cracked a few energy drinks and got to work.