Maybe he meant the Catalyst 2900 which was really a 2 slot version of the 5000 with the sup card and a 12 or 24 port line card already screwed in. I did a large deployment of Lightstreams (It think 1010s), Cat 5000s and Cat 2900s. This was prior to official availability of the Cat 5000 and 2900. They were running beta code and we had to upgrade them every couple of days. We hit a stable enough build about a week before going live to coincide with the official availability of the 5000s. Our customer got a big break on the equipment but had to be live by general availability of the catalysts to be a demonstration customer. The chain smoking tool of an engineer Cisco sent, he like to brag his employee number was in the teens, instilled a distrust of Cisco support engineers that future Cisco engineers have reinforced, the good ones have been few and far between. That system made it live despite his best efforts.

Anyways I digress. The Cat 2900 and Cat 5000 came from the Crescendo acquisition as did Mario Mazzola and Prem Jain.