We’ve all heard that “DARPA invented the Internet.” But few have heard of BBN, the contractor that did the most work to bring the ARPAnet into existence. Today’s piece dives into the history of BBN and the firm’s unique structure. A firm like BBN winning the main portion of the ARPAnet project was a pivotal reason the ARPAnet project went so smoothly. BBN embodied the “
This article is so cool, and provides a lot context that I did not know about for my own history. When I was still a college kid, I worked a small firm that had spun out of MIT Lincoln Labs, and one of my first professional projects was to write software that allowed PDP-11s (and later, VAXen) to talk to ARPAnet IMPs, which we did as a contract for (!!) Citibank, who wanted in. Then I got hired by a small company, Symbolics, where I helped write software that connected Lisp Machines to the ARPAnet using "official" protocols (TCP/IP) as opposed to the MIT-invented CHAOSnet. Symbolics was later issued Internet domain #1, presumably because it was the first envelope opened one fateful day by a person in Washington DC.
Great piece about the takeaways for building the research organization of the future - thank you! The history is worth recounting for that perspective. It may be worth noting that another excellent reference is the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, First Touchstone Edition, 1998 (published by Simon & Schuster).
This article is so cool, and provides a lot context that I did not know about for my own history. When I was still a college kid, I worked a small firm that had spun out of MIT Lincoln Labs, and one of my first professional projects was to write software that allowed PDP-11s (and later, VAXen) to talk to ARPAnet IMPs, which we did as a contract for (!!) Citibank, who wanted in. Then I got hired by a small company, Symbolics, where I helped write software that connected Lisp Machines to the ARPAnet using "official" protocols (TCP/IP) as opposed to the MIT-invented CHAOSnet. Symbolics was later issued Internet domain #1, presumably because it was the first envelope opened one fateful day by a person in Washington DC.
Great piece about the takeaways for building the research organization of the future - thank you! The history is worth recounting for that perspective. It may be worth noting that another excellent reference is the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, First Touchstone Edition, 1998 (published by Simon & Schuster).