ONI Systems went public in June 2000 having sold its first product for barely five months. It didn't matter. Optical networking was the hottest corner of the stock market, and ONI built the gear for the stretch everyone said was jammed: the fiber loops inside cities. Long-haul lines between cities had grown huge. The metro networks that fed them had not. ONI promised to carry many wavelengths of light around those loops at once.

Spun Out of Optivision

Rohit Sharma founded ONI in a spin-out from Optivision, a Silicon Valley optics company. It was incorporated in California on October 20, 1997, as Optical Networks, Incorporated, and took the name ONI Systems in April 2000. The bet was that phone companies and carriers would rebuild their city networks around light instead of copper and old electronic switches. ONI's first product became generally available in January 2000, and carriers began testing it in their metro rings.

Peak Price, Then Ciena

ONI priced its IPO at $25 a share on June 1, 2000, and sold more stock in a follow-on offering that October. Then the telecom boom broke, and the stock fell with the rest of the sector. Carriers stopped spending, and many of ONI's young customers went broke. In 2002 Ciena, a larger optical equipment maker, bought ONI in an all-stock deal. ONI deregistered its shares in June 2002.

Cover: The actor Yamanaka Heikuro I as a demon, Torii Kiyonobu I. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an oni (Japanese demon).