No, they were in California. Boppo was still an undergrad at Caltech (class of '87), as was Bengt (class of '88). Colorado is where Boppo went to grad school, several years later.
> We invented it independently very shortly after, and our explanations were tighter, cleaner, and more focused, as you might expect from mathematicians
Actually, the group at Caltech also had a math guy, Bill Banks (http://www.math.missouri.edu/~bbanks/vitae.pdf)
He and Boppo juggled together a lot, but I don't know if Bill made any contributions to siteswap development.
Another math guy/juggler, Allen Knutson (http://www.math.cornell.edu/People/Faculty/knutson.html), arrived at Caltech the next year. I don't know if he contributed any improvements or not.
I never heard of the Cambridge swaps until now.
This was given as a joke gift to literally thousands of geeks by people who thought "Yeah, right, like that's gonna happen." And then it did.
So in the early 80s there were, for the first time, thousands of geeks who could juggle. At least some were going to take it a bit seriously, and at least some of them were going to apply scientific processes to trying to understand the vast and bewildering array of possible tricks.
Paul Klimek of Santa Cruz was chronologically the first, but he didn't really tell anyone. There's a pre-cursor in an article by Charlie Dancey in Juggler's World magazine. Boppo and Bengt (in Colorado, not California) started to try to make it popular, but got some crucial things wrong and didn't explain it well. They were also extremely enthusiastic, and some people stopped paying attention, which was a shame.
We invented it independently very shortly after, and our explanations were tighter, cleaner, and more focused, as you might expect from mathematicians.
It was subsequently invented independently by at least two others that I know of. It seems to have been "The Right Idea."