Biography | Chuck Robbins — The Bank Tower Where He Wrote Code Before He Sold Networks

The later biography calls him a career sales executive.

The first paycheck was for writing code.

In August 1987, weeks after Chapel Hill commencement, Charles H. Robbins joined North Carolina National Bank in Charlotte as an application developer.

LinkedIn and contemporary profiles all give the same window: August 1987 to July 1992, five years in the Charlotte area.

The bank's world headquarters then sat in NCNB Plaza, the 40-story tower that opened in March 1974 at 101 South Tryon Street.

It was the tallest building in North Carolina until 1987.

The same tower later carried the names NationsBank Plaza and Bank of America Plaza.

It is One South at The Plaza today.

He worked on the bank's early local-area network, the kind of plumbing that made a sales call from a networking vendor possible.

In 1992 he left the bank for Wellfleet Communications, the router house that supplied that network, and spent four and a half years selling instead of writing.

A short year at Ascend Communications followed.

Only then, in December 1997, did he accept a Cisco account-manager job he had already turned down twice.

The Tryon Street tower is where the programmer became the person Cisco would later promote.

Photo: City Dweller 2, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons