BBN has its roots in an initial partnership formed on 15 October 1948 between Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[3][4] Bolt had won a commission to be an acoustic consultant for the new United Nations permanent headquarters to be built in New York City. Realizing the magnitude of the project at hand, Bolt had pulled in his MIT colleague Beranek for help and the partnership between the two was born. The firm, Bolt and Beranek, started out in two rented rooms on the MIT campus. Robert Newman joined the firm soon after in 1950, and the firm became Bolt Beranek Newman.[5] Beranek remained the company's president and chief executive officer until 1967, and Bolt was chairman until 1976.
From 1957 to 1962, J. C. R. Licklider served as vice president of engineering psychology for BBN.[6] Foreseeing the potential to obtain federal grants for basic computer research, Licklider convinced the BBN leadership to purchase a then state-of-the-art Royal McBeeLGP-30 digital computer in 1958 for US$25,000. Within a year, Ken Olsen, president of the newly formed Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), approached BBN to test the prototype of DEC's first computer, the PDP-1.[7] Within one month, BBN completed its tests and recommendations of the PDP-1. BBN ultimately purchased the first PDP-1 for around US$150,000 and received the machine in November 1960.[8][9]
After the PDP-1 arrived, BBN hired two of Licklider's friends from MIT, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, as consultants.[10] McCarthy had been unsuccessful in convincing MIT engineers to build time-sharing systems for computers. He had more success at BBN though, working with Ed Fredkin and Sheldon Boilen in implementing one of the first timesharing systems, the BBN Time-Sharing System.[11] In 1962, BBN would install one such time-shared information system at Massachusetts General Hospital where doctors and nurses could create and access patients' information at various nurses' stations connected to a central computer.[5] BBN would soon begin more research about integrating computers and medicine, hiring Bob Taylor in 1965 and MIT Lincoln Laboratory computer systems engineer Frank Heart in 1966.[12]
As BBN began focusing on computer technology, it gained a reputation as "the third university" in Cambridge alongside Harvard and MIT, and its offices expanded on a site near Fresh Pond in western Cambridge.[13] By 1968, the company had over 600 employees.[14] By the early 1970s, BBN bought a laundromat on Moulton Street and tore it down for a new, seven-story headquarters.[15]
In 1980, the U.S. federal government charged BBN with contracts fraud, alleging that from 1972 to 1978, BBN altered time sheets to hide overcharging the government. That year, two top financial officers plea bargained for suspended sentences and US$20,000 fines, and the company paid a US$700,000 fine.[16]
BBN's September 1994 celebration of the 25th anniversary of ARPANET generated much local and national news coverage from outlets including The Boston Globe, Newsweek, and National Public Radio.[17] By that year, Heart retired from BBN after 28 years; his final position was president of the systems and technology division.[18]
Notable achievements
Dilution refrigerator at BBN Technologies, used to create superconducting quantum computing devicesDr. Talib Hussain, senior scientist at BBN Technologies, looks over the shoulder of a recruit during a training session on the Virtual Environments for Ship and Shore Experiential Learning system at Recruit Training Command.
In August 1968, BBN was selected by ARPA to build an Interface Message Processor (IMP) for the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet.[20][nb 1] The IMPs were the very first generation of gateways, known today as routers. Under the leadership of Frank Heart and Bob Kahn, four IMPs were produced for nearly US$1 million from September to December 1969.[21][22] The first IMP was shipped to the University of California, Los Angeles in September 1969 and the second to the Stanford Research Institute a month later.[23] The first message between the two IMPs was "LO" — phonetically, "Hello" — but the SRI host crashed before the UCLA researcher could complete typing the "LOGIN" command.[5][24]
The architectural acoustics division of BBN faced controversy in the early 1960s with its acoustics design project for the Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at the Lincoln Center in New York City. Beranek and BBN's chief architect were criticized for ignoring important acoustical principles in concert hall design. Many failed minor adjustments led the walls, balconies, and ceilings to be torn out and dumped, and a new consultant oversaw a repair that cost millions of dollars over several years.[13] The division also produced poor results at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. The hall's large volume and seating capacity initially resulted in less than ideal results. Kirkegaard Associates completed acoustical renovations in 1992 at a cost of US$10 million which resulted in substantial improvement.[25]
The substantial calculations required for acoustics work led to an interest, and later business opportunities, in computing. BBN was a pioneer in developing computer models of roadway and aircraft noise, and in designing noise barriers near highways.[28] Some of this technology was used in landmark legal cases where BBN scientists were expert witnesses.[29]
In early 2004, BBN applied its acoustics expertise to design, develop, and deliver the Boomerang shooter detection system in a little over two months to combat the sniper threat US troops faced in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The system immediately pinpoints the location of hostile fire. Since then, more than 11,000 Boomerang systems have been deployed by U.S. and allied forces.
Ray Tomlinson of BBN is widely credited as having invented the first person-to-person network email in 1971 [30] and the use of the @ sign in an email address.[31][32][33]
BBN was a key participant in the creation of the Internet. It was the first organization to receive an Autonomous System Number (AS1) for network identification.[42] ASNs are an essential identification element used for Internet Backbone Routing; lower numbers generally indicate a longer established presence on the Internet. AS1 is now operated by Level 3 Communications following their acquisition of BBN's Genuity internet service provider. BBN registered the bbn.com domain on 24 April 1985, making it the second oldest domain name on the internet.[43][44] In addition, BBN researchers participated in the development of TCP, created the Voice Funnel, an early predecessor of voice over IP, helped lead the creation of the first email security standard, Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), chaired development of the "core" Internet Protocol security suite (IPsec) standards, and performed extensive work to secure the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
In the 1970s, BBN created Telenet, Inc., to run the first public packet-switched network.
In 1983, BBN Instruments was sold to Vibro-Meter Corp..
In 1989, BBN's acoustical consulting business was spun off into a new corporation, Acentech Incorporated, located across the street from BBN headquarters in Cambridge.[46]
BBN formed an early Internet service provider in 1994 as its BBN Planet division.[47] Previously traded as "BBN" on the stock market, the company was purchased by GTE in 1997 as a wholly owned subsidiary.[48] BBN Planet was joined with GTE's national fiber network to become GTE Internetworking, "powered by BBN". When GTE and Bell Atlantic merged to become Verizon in 2000, the Internet service provider division of BBN was included in assets spun off as Genuity to satisfy Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements, leaving behind the remainder of BBN Technologies. Genuity was later acquired out of bankruptcy by Level 3 Communications in 2003.[49] In March 2004, Verizon sold the remainder of the company, by then known as BBNT Solutions LLC, to a group of private investors from Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, In-Q-Tel and BBN's own management,[50] making BBN an independent company for the next five years.
In September 2009, Raytheon entered into an agreement to acquire BBN as a wholly owned subsidiary.[51] The acquisition was completed on 29 October 2009 [52] and the company was valued at approximately US$350 million.[53] BBN owned the domain bbn.com, the second oldest currently registered domain name on the Internet, which ran continuously from April 1985 to mid-December 2019.
Digital Force Technologies (DFT) of San Diego, California was a wholly owned BBN subsidiary, purchased in June 2008, and spun out in 2018.[54]
Former BBN employees have formed about a hundred startup companies with varying levels of official involvement, including Parlance Corporation and EveryZing.[55]
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research", was part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered to be among the most prominent figures in computer science development and general computing history.
William Crowther is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and inspired the text adventure game genre.
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
Richard Henry Bolt was an American physics professor at MIT with an interest in acoustics. He was one of the founders of the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which built the ARPANET, a forerunner of the Internet.
The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network that began operation in 1981 in the United States. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to ARPANET, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet. CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.
Robert William Taylor, known as Bob Taylor, was an American Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.
Wallace "Wally" Feurzeig was an American computer scientist who was co-inventor, with Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, of the programming language Logo, and a well-known researcher in artificial intelligence (AI).
The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. An IMP was a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer with special-purpose interfaces and software. In later years the IMPs were made from the non-ruggedized Honeywell 316 which could handle two-thirds of the communication traffic at approximately one-half the cost. An IMP requires the connection to a host computer via a special bit-serial interface, defined in BBN Report 1822. The IMP software and the ARPA network communications protocol running on the IMPs was discussed in RFC 1, the first of a series of standardization documents published by what later became the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Lawrence Gilman Roberts was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002.
Daniel L. Murphy is an American computer scientist notable for his involvement in the development of TECO, the operating systems TENEX and TOPS-20, and email.
John M. McQuillan is an American computer scientist who did studies of adaptive routing in the early ARPANET and the subsequent Internet.
Frank Evans Heart was an American computer engineer influential in computer networking. After nearly 15 years working for MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Heart worked for Bolt, Beranek and Newman from 1966 to 1994, during which he led a team that designed the first routing computer for the ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet.
The BBN Time-Sharing System was an early time-sharing system created at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) for the PDP-1 computer. It began operation in September 1962.
SATNET, also known as the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network, was an early satellite network that formed an initial segment of the Internet. It was implemented by BBN Technologies under the direction of the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
A long-running debate in computer science known as the Protocol Wars occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s and has since resulted in most of the competing protocols disappearing.
David Corydon Walden was an American computer scientist who contributed to the engineering development of the ARPANET, a precursor of the modern internet. He specifically contributed to the Interface Message Processor, which was the packet switching node for the ARPANET. Walden was a contributor to IEEE Computer Society's Annals of the History of Computing and was a member of the TeX Users Group.
References
↑ "BBN Corp.", International Directory of Company Histories
1 2 3 Beranek, Leo (2005). "BBN's earliest days: founding a culture of engineering creativity". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 27 (2): 6–14. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2005.20. S2CID12645672.
↑ Roberts, Dr. Lawrence G. (May 1995). "The ARPANET & Computer Networks". Archived from the original on 24 March 2016. Retrieved 13 April 2016. Then in June 1966, Davies wrote a second internal paper, "Proposal for a Digital Communication Network" In which he coined the word packet,- a small sub part of the message the user wants to send, and also introduced the concept of an "Interface computer" to sit between the user equipment and the packet network.
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