
Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died - sew
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/business/leo-beranek-dead.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
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Homunculiheaded
I 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.

~~~
fjarlq
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](http://history.computer.org/pubs/bbn-print2.pdf)

~~~
musha68k
Thank you very much for sharing this!

------
robmiller
I'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.

~~~
gusmd
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.

------
davidbalbert
Beranek 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://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01FIPHEXM](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01FIPHEXM)

~~~
vidarh
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...

------
vidarh
One 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.'

------
greenyoda
This 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/](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor)

~~~
jeffbarr
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.

~~~
syngrog66
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

~~~
lb1lf
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!!!

------
jmorrison
Worked 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.

------
a11r
A great account of the building of the IMP: "where wizards stay up late".

~~~
zem
agreed. one of the two best history of computing books I've read, "dealers of
lightning" being the other

------
chiph
One 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.

------
contingencies
_In 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.

------
rbanffy
ifdown eth0 ; sleep 60 ; ifup eth0

------
macintux
I 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.)

~~~
macintux
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.

------
FigmentEngine
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?

~~~
elliotec
It's interesting. I appreciate it. It does define something. Think of Aaron
Schwartz or something for contrast.

~~~
schoen
James Grimmelmann follows this style when writing obituaries; here's his
obituary for Aaron.

[http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_...](http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_26)

