My favorite part, besides the great people, was the collection of classic computing hardware. They had a warehouse that I really should have spent more time in; during my one visit, to rescue a massive hard drive (physically massive, only 1GB capacity), I spotted multiple IMPs and a pallet of early Macs.
The security R&D department where I worked had a Sparc laptop for its demo computer; only time I’ve ever worked on one, or even seen one.
My least favorite part was the huge 10base2 LAN. First and only time I’ve had to deal with those fragile terminators, plus the AppleTalk repeater in a closet nearby that someone would frequently bump and cause a network storm.
And of course we were all using NFS, which at the time was completely unable to deal gracefully with a disconnection from the server (no idea whether that has changed since then).
Fun times. Amazing company and history, and working in Cambridge was a delight; I had a (relatively) cheap apartment in Somerville right outside Davis Square, and could ride a bike to work without much difficulty, or ride the Red Line for just one stop. Not having to drive my car anywhere was a revelation.
> And of course we were all using NFS, which at the time was completely unable to deal gracefully with a disconnection from the server (no idea whether that has changed since then).
NFS itself has always been able to deal with it, it's just that hard mount and nointr were the default (still are I think), so any connectivity problems meant having to kill -9 the client. Soft mounts weren't common because client software wasn't written to deal with the notion that the filesystem could just go away. NFS4 changed pretty much everything, but the main factor that's changed since olden times is that networks are just more reliable these days.
It's such a wild tale. What a wonder-land setup; this amazing research firm that so cyclically pulls in interesting projects and uses that to pull in interesting people which helps it get more interesting projects. What a whole different world that feels like!
> Not assigning this systems engineering-style contract to an academic department makes sense. Most academic departments are just not staffed and structured in a way to make projects like this feasible. But it’s unclear how an outfit like Raytheon would have done working through problems like the one described above. Would they have been able to solve them? If so, how quickly?
What a set of ideas to obsess over (at least to me)! The initial arpanet contract was for equivalent of $8m. Big players were mostly no-bidding it.
I wish tech had more people asking for outlandish bat shit wild stuff, stuff we don't even know if we can do. But just as much, I guess what's equally crazy is that this was kind of just one ask: it happened to be an extremely good ask, opened up so many further frontiers for exploration. We can come up with absurd abstract problems & challenges, but which problems are abstract enough to be get new inquiries after? What expands thought-spaces as we work it?
The USSR provided the competition that resulted in funding these kinds of projects; does innovation require a multipolar world? (Compare Renaissance Europe and China?)
Great article that captures some of what made BBN a special place. And to some extent still does: although the company was acquired by defense giant Raytheon over a decade ago and www.bbn.com (the second-oldest .com domain name!) now redirects to a Raytheon page, it operates independently and maintains a good deal of its traditional culture.
I toured the office as a candidate intern over two decades ago, when they showed me their computer cluster and demonstrated their news video closed captioning system, which successfully performed live diarization. The engineer was quite proud, and I was impressed too. Another engineer asked me about OCR. This was during the start of the Iraq War. I think they must have been busy sifting through all the data that involved.
On the subject of ARPANet, anyone remember the Internet2, mobile ad hoc networks, cognitive radio networks, sensor networks, and mesh networks? A whole bunch of technologies that went nowhere, sucking up researchers. In my youthful ignorance, I got sucked in too.
> And we had a telephone connection between these two…so they could talk to each other. What happened is Charley typed the “L” and he asked, “You get the ‘L?’” And the answer was, “Got the ‘L.’” He typed the ‘O.’ “You get the ‘O?’” “Got the ‘O.’” He typed the ‘G.’ “You get the ‘G?’” Wacko! The system crashed. This machine [SRI’s] went down.
> So the very first message on the internet ever was “LO,” as in, “Lo and behold!” You couldn’t ask for a better, more effective message.
... except that they tried again, and succeeded, so the first three characters on the internet were LOL.
UCL-CS in London had a BBN butterfly replacement for in IMP or fuzzball. This was before an EGP was agreed and prefix route order was a bit deterministic.
We occasionally used to get expelled from the butterfly route map, under load/volume.
Development under a fixed term contract, No contract extension.. so no fix.
My favorite part, besides the great people, was the collection of classic computing hardware. They had a warehouse that I really should have spent more time in; during my one visit, to rescue a massive hard drive (physically massive, only 1GB capacity), I spotted multiple IMPs and a pallet of early Macs.
The security R&D department where I worked had a Sparc laptop for its demo computer; only time I’ve ever worked on one, or even seen one.
My least favorite part was the huge 10base2 LAN. First and only time I’ve had to deal with those fragile terminators, plus the AppleTalk repeater in a closet nearby that someone would frequently bump and cause a network storm.
And of course we were all using NFS, which at the time was completely unable to deal gracefully with a disconnection from the server (no idea whether that has changed since then).
Fun times. Amazing company and history, and working in Cambridge was a delight; I had a (relatively) cheap apartment in Somerville right outside Davis Square, and could ride a bike to work without much difficulty, or ride the Red Line for just one stop. Not having to drive my car anywhere was a revelation.