Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
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Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#2I'm glad this made it to HN. While he was the founder of BBN which we all know was involved in ARPANET, you won't find the Internet in his Wikipedia entry. It started as an acoustical consulting firm--the one whose employees started many firms across the US and describe in their lineage from BBN.
He was one of the fathers of architectural acoustics, noise control and vibration isolation, and remained active until the end, traveling to conferences, publishing papers and such. I met him in Seattle in 2011 at the spring Acoustical Society of America conference. Genuinely warm of a guy, always interested in others' research.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#3I worked at BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) from 2006-2008 and was fortunate enough to have a one-on-one phone call with Leo while I worked there. At that time he was in his early 90s, and was still amazingly sharp and full of energy. Even in a brief phone call his curiosity and kindness left a long lasting impact.
BBN was (and presumably still is, though now part of Raytheon) an amazing company to work for even 50 years after its heyday as one of the original contractors on the ARPANET project. I remember getting to meet Ray Tomlinson (who sadly passed this March) and a wide range of others who were instrumental in the early days of the internet. Seeing what was happening in CS research at the time was pivotal for me changing my career towards computer science.
One of my favorite anecdotes about the early years of the company: As mentioned in another comment, BBN started as an acoustics firm. While JCR Licklider was there briefly in the early 60s he got the company to purchase a computer. This was expensive and somewhat out of the scope of the company, when asked why purchase such the thing the response was “this company is full of smart people, they’ll figure something out”. A few years later Licklider was a PM at ARPA in charge of the ARPANET project which BBN would soon become the lead contractor on.
Leo definitely lived to a ripe old age, but he will be missed nonetheless.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#4This brings back memories of being connected to the ARPANET through a BBN IMP[1] in 1982. Here's a photo of BBN's iconic refrigerator-sized network interface box:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5114191251/
Some years later, our CS department's IMP was replaced by a much smaller Cisco router (and our .ARPA e-mail addresses with .EDU addresses).
I had always associated BBN with internet engineering, so it was interesting to read that they started out in a completely different business.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#5This brings back memories of being connected to the ARPANET through a BBN IMP[1] in 1982. Here's a photo of BBN's iconic refrigerator-sized network interface box: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5114191251/ Some years later, our CS department's IMP was replaced by a much smaller Cisco router (and our .ARPA e-mail addresses with .EDU addresses). I had always associated BBN with internet engineering, so it was…
Yes, happy memories (1972?) of sitting at a terminal next to Harvard's CRCT IMP (56Kb connections to 2 other nodes, woohoo!) late at night and picking up the phone on the side when it rang, with BBN network ops folks calling and asking me to reboot it manually...
(The IMP also functioned as a local router between the PDP-10 and the PDP-1.)
I also remember Ray Tomlinson well from the first email list on the ARPAnet, meta-appropriately about email lists, protocols, and clients.
Those were simpler times when receiving an email was done by anonymous FTP appending to your mail.txt file.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#6A great account of the building of the IMP: "where wizards stay up late".
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#7This brings back memories of being connected to the ARPANET through a BBN IMP[1] in 1982. Here's a photo of BBN's iconic refrigerator-sized network interface box: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5114191251/ Some years later, our CS department's IMP was replaced by a much smaller Cisco router (and our .ARPA e-mail addresses with .EDU addresses). I had always associated BBN with internet engineering, so it was…
Sometime around 1979 or 1980 someone gave me a slip of paper with a phone number and said "Dial this with a modem."
I did, it answered "Pentagon TIP," and before too long I was roving around the ARPANET. If memory serves me right the main command was "C" for connect. You simply typed "C" and a small number, and then logged in as "guest"/"guest" (the world was smaller and more innocent back then). I'm fairly certain that I logged in to a system at UC Berkeley.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#8[deleted]
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#9I'm glad this made it to HN. While he was the founder of BBN which we all know was involved in ARPANET, you won't find the Internet in his Wikipedia entry. It started as an acoustical consulting firm--the one whose employees started many firms across the US and describe in their lineage from BBN. He was one of the fathers of architectural acoustics, noise control and vibration isolation, and remained active until the…
Second that. I had no idea of his involvement in CS, though, and I'm happy to see this here.
I did my master's in Acoustics (Am an M.E.), and his books were some of my go-to for "foundation" concepts in Acoustics. As a professional nowadays I still reach out to them from time to time. Like you said, he was still fairly active on conferences. He left an amazing legacy and is sure to be missed in the Acoustics community.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#10Beranek and BBN both make an appearance in Mitch Waldrop's excellent book "The Dream Machine," which is in theory a biography of J.C.R. Licklider (who was mentioned in the obit), but in practice a history of computing from the 1930s onward. It has been out of print for some time, but a Kindle edition just came out this summer[1]. It's a great book and worth many times the $3.99 Amazon is charging for it.