ifdown eth0 ; sleep 60 ; ifup eth0
Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#22I 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 ye…
Thank you for sharing this story. Always fascinating to learn more about computer pioneers.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#23I 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 ye…
Beranek wrote about that anecdote in his first chapter of the excellent book A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN : http://history.computer.org/pubs/bbn-print2.pdf
nice link to learn about the ideas of the internet pioneers
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
nice. that was also a time when every geeky kid kinda secretly feared (or hoped) you might stumble into a system which, after login, would prompt you with: "Welcome! Would you like to play a game of global thermonuclear war?" and then you really would be worried you were connected to the Pentagon
I did sort of the opposite back in the very early nineties - I had my MicroVAX ID as a Norwegian DoD machine when anyone dialed it.
That netted me a few laughs as friends got confused - and a summons to see the local police a few weeks later; apparently, someone had thought it WAS indeed a DoD box, reported the security breach and the next thing my local PD knew, the security services called and asked them to tell me it was quite funny and all that - but STOP DOING IT!!!
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#25I 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 ye…
Beranek wrote about that anecdote in his first chapter of the excellent book A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN : http://history.computer.org/pubs/bbn-print2.pdf
Thank you very much for sharing this!
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#26One of the really cool things that I saw when I was in the USAF was a BBN-made IMP get installed. It was 3 or 4 large white cabinets and was way in the back of the communications center at McClellan AFB. I had no idea that it would become so influential.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#27I worked at BBN in the late 90s, started a month before the GTE purchase was announced.
One of my favorite memories was their warehouse of old equipment. Walking through that was like visiting a computing museum, including the only IMP I've ever seen. (Grabbed a 1GB Xyratex hard drive for an experiment; weighed 40-50lbs, IIRC. Huge.)
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#28I worked at BBN in the late 90s, started a month before the GTE purchase was announced. One of my favorite memories was their warehouse of old equipment. Walking through that was like visiting a computing museum, including the only IMP I've ever seen. (Grabbed a 1GB Xyratex hard drive for an experiment; weighed 40-50lbs, IIRC. Huge.)
Another less-than-fond memory was our LAN. (20 year old memories, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)
At the time, all of the R&D teams (the company was effectively two halves, R&D and ISP) were on a single physical network.
Roughly 2000 computers, all on a 10-base-2 network.
If you've never had the misfortune of working with 10-base-2, lucky you. I'd never seen it before, and never since. Didn't take much to bring it down.
Whenever I'd lose contact with our NFS server (NFS, sigh) I'd check my transceiver; if the yellow light was pegged, that typically meant someone in a nearby data closet had bumped the Appletalk repeater and we could count on several minutes of misery.
It seemed remarkable that the company largely responsible for building the Arpanet, who as an ISP was responsible for how many thousands of users I had no idea, had such a rickety network for its own employees.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#29I always find it wierd, the phrase "Dies at xxx" like that defines something. "Born at 0" is odd.. Can't we focus on what they did? rather than the lenght of life?
You're suggesting a dichotomoy that isn't there. They assuredly focused on his life, not the length of it directly, in the article. It's simply customary as a suggestion of who and how someone died when it's particular ages.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#30In other words, can you write a specification saying that if you’re going to have an office, the noise should not be any greater than so much? What are acceptable noise standards in a home, in a factory, in a concert hall? I wrote those.
I like this guy. In a London open plan office in 2010 I measured background noise and it was above legal limits for a workplace. I mentioned it to management, nobody cared. However, I think the whole notion of 'offices should be quiet' - although valid - is now almost an anachronism.