I 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?
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
#12I 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?
It's interesting. I appreciate it. It does define something. Think of Aaron Schwartz or something for contrast.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#13A great account of the building of the IMP: "where wizards stay up late".
agreed. one of the two best history of computing books I've read, "dealers of lightning" being the other
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#14Worked at BBN from 1983-1990, at the tail end of the NCP->IP/TCP "transition." Terrifically interesting stuff to work on, with loads of terrifically smart people to learn from. One of the legendary recruiters there (rest his soul) referred to the place as a "halfway house for failed MIT & Harvard PhDs." A magical place, and I feel lucky to have fooled that recruiter into letting me get hired.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#15I 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?
It's interesting. I appreciate it. It does define something. Think of Aaron Schwartz or something for contrast.
James Grimmelmann follows this style when writing obituaries; here's his obituary for Aaron.
http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_...
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#16I 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:
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#17This 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 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
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#18I 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?
It gives some context to the death, before I read the article. Knowing that he was born during the First World War tells me that he was already older me than me when he started working on ARPANET.
If the whole article focused on his age, I'd be disappointed. But it's just in the headline, and the article does focus on his life.
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#19Beranek 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. [1]. https:/…
I'd like to second that, and mention that it's excellent to combine with "What the Dormouse Said" (John Markoff) and "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (Steven Levy).
Very loosely, while there is lots of overlap between the three, Markoff covers the West Coast more thoroughly, with more material around his idea that a lot of the development there owes a great deal to LSD...
Levy covers the East Coast more thoroughly, going into a lot of detail about MIT, and the environment around the MIT AI Lab.
While Waldrop both goes further back, and takes a higher level view of the politics and DARPA itself.
There are of course plenty of other pieces to branch off into once you get to the rise of home computing in particular, but the above three books combine to give an even more fascinating picture of the early days of computing than they do separately. And BBN of course still stands out as one of the highly important pieces.
BBN is one of those companies that are fascinating to me, because like e.g. DEC, when I first got online in '93, they were the type of legendary that you when you are young take note of the status of, but don't really know the significance of, until you get a bit older and start being interested in the history of what you've built your career on...
Re: Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died
#20One of the little signs you have made an impact: When the NY Times interviews you for your own obituary:
'“As president, I decided to take B.B.N. into the field of man-machine systems because I felt acoustics was a limited field and no one seemed to be offering consulting services in that area,” Dr. Beranek said in a 2012 interview for this obituary.'