A great in-depth article on BBN’s involvement in ARPAnet!
(Also, part 1 of an upcoming trilogy.)
BBN’s stellar results on the ARPAnet project did not shock many in the computing community. In the late 1960s, the firm was known to be special. It was an interesting kind of research firm, of a sort we don’t see much of today. BBN’s staff found themselves natural members of the elite Cambridge, Massachusetts research community despite the firm’s for-profit status. The firm was home to some of the best theoretical researchers in Cambridge — formerly professors at Harvard and MIT — as well as top-tier engineering researchers who often defected from the large computing projects at MIT’s Lincoln Lab.
In general, many researchers defected because they believed BBN was a better place to work on big problems in more exciting ways than at Lincoln. Theoretically inclined researchers, like Robert Kahn, found this a great place to do proper research in an applied context. Great engineers who cared less for theory, like the project’s lead engineer Frank Heart, found the firm an ideal structure to work on implementing real technology that still had an extreme level of novelty.
Early IMP Contributors (Left to Right): Truett Thatch, Bill Bartell (Honeywell), Dave Walden, Jim Geisman, Robert Kahn, Frank Heart, Ben Barker, Marty Thorpe, Will Crowther, Severo Ornstein. Not pictured: Bernie Cosell. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Via HN.
