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Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in
Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...
, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the
Frank P. Brown Medal The Frank P. Brown Medal was formerly awarded by the Franklin Institute for excellence in science, engineering, and structures. It was established by the 1938 will of Franklin Pierce Brown, a member of the Master Plumbers Association. The designer ...
, in 1999 BBN received the
IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition The IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition was established by the IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associate ...
, and on 1 February 2013, BBN was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honors that the U.S. government bestows upon scientists, engineers and inventors, by President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon in 2009.


History

BBN has its roots in an initial partnership formed on 15 October 1948 between
Leo Beranek Leo Leroy Beranek (September 15, 1914 – October 10, 2016) was an American acoustics expert, former MIT professor, and a founder and former president of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies). He authored ''Acoustics'', considered a cl ...
and Richard Bolt, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bolt had won a commission to be an acoustic consultant for the new
United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmonizi ...
permanent headquarters to be built in New York City. Realizing the magnitude of the project at hand, Bolt had pulled in his MIT colleague Beranek for help and the partnership between the two was born. The firm, Bolt and Beranek, started out in two rented rooms on the MIT campus. Robert Newman joined the firm soon after in 1950, and the firm became Bolt Beranek Newman. Beranek remained the company's president and chief executive officer until 1967, and Bolt was chairman until 1976. From 1957 to 1962,
J. C. R. Licklider Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
served as vice president of engineering psychology for BBN. Foreseeing the potential to obtain federal grants for basic computer research, Licklider convinced the BBN leadership to purchase a then state-of-the-art Royal McBee LGP-30 digital computer in 1958 for US$25,000. Within a year, Ken Olsen, president of the newly formed Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), approached BBN to test the prototype of DEC's first computer, the PDP-1. Within one month, BBN completed its tests and recommendations of the PDP-1. BBN ultimately purchased the first PDP-1 for around US$150,000 and received the machine in November 1960. After the PDP-1 arrived, BBN hired two of Licklider's friends from MIT, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, as consultants. McCarthy had been unsuccessful in convincing MIT engineers to build time-sharing systems for computers. He had more success at BBN though, working with Ed Fredkin and Sheldon Boilen in implementing one of the first timesharing systems, the
BBN Time-Sharing System The BBN Time-Sharing System was an early time-sharing system created at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) for the PDP-1 computer. It began operation in September 1962. History J. C. R. Licklider left MIT to become a vice president at Bolt Beran ...
. In 1962, BBN would install one such time-shared information system at Massachusetts General Hospital where doctors and nurses could create and access patients' information at various nurses' stations connected to a central computer. BBN would soon begin more research about integrating computers and medicine, hiring Bob Taylor in 1965 and MIT Lincoln Laboratory computer systems engineer Frank Heart in 1966. As BBN began focusing on computer technology, it gained a reputation as "the third university" in Cambridge alongside
Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher l ...
and
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
, and its offices expanded on a site near Fresh Pond in western Cambridge. By 1968, the company had over 600 employees. By the early 1970s, BBN bought a laundromat on Moulton Street and tore it down for a new, seven-story headquarters. In 1980, the U.S. federal government charged BBN with contracts fraud, alleging that from 1972 to 1978, BBN altered time sheets to hide overcharging the government. That year, two top financial officers plea bargained for suspended sentences and US$20,000 fines, and the company paid a US$700,000 fine. BBN's September 1994 celebration of the 25th anniversary of ARPANET generated much local and national news coverage from outlets including '' The Boston Globe'', '' Newsweek'', and National Public Radio. By that year, Heart retired from BBN after 28 years; his final position was president of the systems and technology division.


Notable achievements

BBN is best known for its DARPA-sponsored research. It has made notable advances in a wide variety of fields, including
acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...
, computer technologies, quantum information, and synthetic biology. In recent years, BBN has led a wide range of research and development projects, including the standardization effort for the security extension to the
Border Gateway Protocol Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vector routing protocol, and it makes ...
(
BGPsec Border Gateway Protocol Security (BGPsec) is a security extension of the Border Gateway Protocol defined in RFC 8205, published in September 2017. BGPsec provides to receivers of valid BGPsec UPDATE messages cryptographic verification of the routes ...
), mobile ad hoc networks, advanced
speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the mai ...
, the military's
Boomerang A boomerang () is a thrown tool, typically constructed with aerofoil sections and designed to spin about an axis perpendicular to the direction of its flight. A returning boomerang is designed to return to the thrower, while a non-returning b ...
mobile shooter detection system,
cognitive radio A cognitive radio (CR) is a radio that can be programmed and configured dynamically to use the best wireless channels in its vicinity to avoid user interference and congestion. Such a radio automatically detects available channels in wireless spe ...
spectrum use via the
DARPA XG The neXt Generation program or XG is a technology development project sponsored by DARPA's Strategic Technology Office, with the goals to "develop both the enabling technologies and system concepts to dynamically redistribute allocated spectrum alo ...
program. In the early 2000s, BBN created the world's first quantum key distribution network, the DARPA Quantum Network, which operated for 3 years across Cambridge and Boston, and which included the world's first fully operational prototype of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector. BBN also led the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project for the National Science Foundation, which ultimately built out programmable "future Internet" infrastructure across approximately 60 university campuses.


Interface Message Processor

In August 1968, BBN was selected by ARPA to build an Interface Message Processor (IMP) for the
ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foun ...
, the precursor to the modern Internet. The IMPs were the very first generation of gateways, known today as routers. Under the leadership of Frank Heart and
Bob Kahn Robert Elliot Kahn (born December 23, 1938) is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the hear ...
, four IMPs were produced for nearly US$1 million from September to December 1969. The first IMP was shipped to the University of California, Los Angeles in September 1969 and the second to the Stanford Research Institute a month later. The first message between the two IMPs was "LO" — phonetically, "Hello" — but the SRI host crashed before the UCLA researcher could complete typing the "LOGIN" command.


Acoustics

Well-known acoustics commissions include MIT's
Kresge Auditorium Kresge Auditorium (MIT Building W16) is an auditorium structure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located at 48 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, with g ...
(1954),
Tanglewood Tanglewood is a music venue in the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. It has been the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937. Tanglewood is also home to three music schools: the ...
's Koussevitzky Music Shed (1959), Lincoln Center's
Avery Fisher Hall David Geffen Hall is a concert hall in New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The 2,200-seat auditorium opened in 1962, and is the home of the New York Philharmonic. The facility, designe ...
(1962),
Clowes Memorial Hall Clowes Memorial Hall, officially known as Clowes Memorial Hall of Butler University, is a performance hall located on the campus of Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Opened October 18, 1963, it hosts numerous significant ...
(1963) in Indianapolis, the
National Gallery of Victoria The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum. The NGV houses an encyclopedic art collection across two ...
(1968), the
Cultural Center of the Philippines The Cultural Center of the Philippines ( fil, Sentrong Pangkultura ng Pilipinas, or CCP) is a government-owned and controlled corporation established to preserve, develop and promote arts and culture in the Philippines.Presidential Decree No. ...
(1969), Baltimore's
Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall The Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, often referred to simply as the Meyerhoff, is a music venue that opened September 16, 1982, at 1212 Cathedral Street in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The main auditorium ...
(1978) and
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall is the concert hall component of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center in San Francisco, California. The 2,743-seat hall was completed in 1980 at a cost of US$28 million to give the San Francisc ...
(1979). The architectural acoustics division of BBN faced controversy in the early 1960s with its acoustics design project for the Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at the Lincoln Center in New York City. Beranek and BBN's chief architect were criticized for ignoring important acoustical principles in concert hall design. Many failed minor adjustments led the walls, balconies, and ceilings to be torn out and dumped, and a new consultant oversaw a repair that cost millions of dollars over several years. The division also produced poor results at the
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall is the concert hall component of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center in San Francisco, California. The 2,743-seat hall was completed in 1980 at a cost of US$28 million to give the San Francisc ...
in San Francisco. The hall's large volume and
seating capacity Seating capacity is the number of people who can be seated in a specific space, in terms of both the physical space available, and limitations set by law. Seating capacity can be used in the description of anything ranging from an automobile that ...
initially resulted in less than ideal results. Kirkegaard Associates completed acoustical renovations in 1992 at a cost of US$10 million which resulted in substantial improvement. In the 1960s and 1970s, experts at the company examined audio tapes related to notable events in U.S. history, including the
John F. Kennedy assassination Dictabelt recording The John F. Kennedy assassination Dictabelt recording was a Dictabelt recording from a motorcycle police officer's radio microphone stuck in the open position that became a key piece of evidence cited by the House Select Committee on Assassination ...
, an audio recording from the 1970
Kent State shootings The Kent State shootings, also known as the May 4 massacre and the Kent State massacre,"These would be the first of many probes into what soon became known as the Kent State Massacre. Like the Boston Massacre almost exactly two hundred years bef ...
, and during the 1974 Watergate scandal, the tape of President Richard Nixon that had 18.5 minutes erased. The substantial calculations required for acoustics work led to an interest, and later business opportunities, in computing. BBN was a pioneer in developing computer models of roadway and
aircraft noise Aircraft noise pollution refers to noise produced by aircraft in flight that has been associated with several negative stress-mediated health effects, from sleep disorders to cardiovascular ones. Governments have enacted extensive controls that a ...
, and in designing noise barriers near highways. Some of this technology was used in landmark legal cases where BBN scientists were expert witnesses. In early 2004, BBN applied its acoustics expertise to design, develop, and deliver the Boomerang shooter detection system in a little over two months to combat the sniper threat US troops faced in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The system immediately pinpoints the location of hostile fire. Since then, more than 11,000 Boomerang systems have been deployed by U.S. and allied forces.


Computer technologies

BBN bought a number of computers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably the first production PDP-1 from Digital Equipment Corporation, on which it implemented the
BBN Time-Sharing System The BBN Time-Sharing System was an early time-sharing system created at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) for the PDP-1 computer. It began operation in September 1962. History J. C. R. Licklider left MIT to become a vice president at Bolt Beran ...
(1962). Ray Tomlinson of BBN is widely credited as having invented the first person-to-person network email in 1971 and the use of the @ sign in an email address. BBN has had a very distinguished career in natural-language understanding, ranging from
speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the mai ...
through
machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates th ...
and more recently machine understanding of the causality of events and accurate forecasts for the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is an organization within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responsible for leading research to overcome difficult challenges relevant to the United States Intellige ...
(IARPA). BBN's education group, led by
Wally Feurzeig Wallace "Wally" Feurzeig (June 10, 1927 – January 4, 2013) was an American computer scientist who was co-inventor, with Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, of the programming language Logo, and a well-known researcher in artificial intellig ...
, created the
Logo programming language Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. ''Logo'' is not an acronym: the name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Gree ...
, conceived by BBN consultant Seymour Papert as a programming language that school-age children could learn. Other well-known BBN computer-related innovations include
Interlisp Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, ...
programming language, the TENEX operating system, and the
Colossal Cave Adventure ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' (also known as ''Adventure'' or ''ADVENT'') is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the pl ...
game. BBN also is well known for its parallel computing systems, including the
Pluribus The Pluribus''Pluribus'' is the ablative plural of the Latin word for "more" or "above." multiprocessor was an early multi-processor computer designed by BBN for use as a packet switch in the ARPANET. Its design later influenced the BBN Butter ...
, and the
BBN Butterfly The BBN Butterfly was a massively parallel computer built by Bolt, Beranek and Newman in the 1980s. It was named for the "butterfly" multi-stage switching network around which it was built. Each machine had up to 512 CPUs, each with local memory, ...
computers, which have been used for such tasks as warfare simulation for the
U.S. Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage of ...
. BBN also developed the RS/1, RS/Explore, RS/Discover and the Cornerstone statistical software systems, and played a pioneering role in the development of today's semantic web, including participating in the
DARPA Agent Markup Language The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) was the name of a US funding program at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started in 1999 by then-Program Manager James Hendler, and later run by Murray Burke, Mark Greaves and Michael ...
project and chairing Web Ontology Language standardization.


Networking technologies

BBN was involved in building some of the earliest Internet networks, including the implementation and operation of the
ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foun ...
and its Interface Message Processors;, as well as SATNET,
PRNET The Packet Radio Network (PRNET) was a set of early, experimental mobile ad hoc networks whose technologies evolved over time. It was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Major participants in the project included BBN Technolog ...
,
MILNET In computer networking, MILNET (fully Military Network) was the name given to the part of the ARPANET internetwork designated for unclassified United States Department of Defense traffic.DEFENSE DATA NETWORK NEWSLETTEDDN-NEWS 26 6 May 1983 MILNE ...
,
SIMNET SIMNET was a wide area network with vehicle simulators and displays for real-time distributed combat simulation: tanks, helicopters and airplanes in a virtual battlefield. SIMNET was developed for and used by the United States military. SIMNET dev ...
, the
Terrestrial Wideband Network {{more footnotes, date=June 2019 The Terrestrial Wideband Network was a DARPA-sponsored experimental network designed to support research in high-speed networking protocols and distributed multimedia applications. It was built and operated by BB ...
, the
Defense Simulation Internet {{more footnotes, date=June 2019 The Defense Simulation Internet (DSI) was a specialized, wide-area network created to support Distributed Interactive Simulation and videoconferences. It was sponsored by DARPA, and built and operated by BBN Tech ...
, CSNET, and NEARNET. In the course of these activities, BBN researchers invented the first
link-state routing protocol Link-state routing protocols are one of the two main classes of routing protocols used in packet switching networks for computer communications, the others being distance-vector routing protocols. Examples of link-state routing protocols includ ...
. BBN was a key participant in the creation of the Internet. It was the first organization to receive an Autonomous System Number (AS1) for network identification. ASNs are an essential identification element used for Internet Backbone Routing; lower numbers generally indicate a longer established presence on the Internet. AS1 is now operated by Level 3 Communications following their acquisition of BBN's Genuity internet service provider. BBN registered the ''bbn.com'' domain on 24 April 1985, making it the second oldest domain name on the internet. In addition, BBN researchers participated in the development of TCP, created the
Voice Funnel The Voice Funnel was an experimental high-speed interface between digitized speech streams and a packet switching communications network, in particular the ARPANET. It was built in the time frame from 1979 to 1981. It may be viewed as an early Voice ...
, an early predecessor of voice over IP, helped lead the creation of the first email security standard, Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), chaired development of the "core" Internet Protocol security suite (
IPsec In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...
) standards, and performed extensive work to secure the
Border Gateway Protocol Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vector routing protocol, and it makes ...
(BGP). BBN also created a series of mobile ad hoc networks starting in the 1970s with DARPA's experimental
PRNET The Packet Radio Network (PRNET) was a set of early, experimental mobile ad hoc networks whose technologies evolved over time. It was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Major participants in the project included BBN Technolog ...
and
SURAN The Survivable Radio Network (SURAN) project was sponsored by DARPA in the 1980s to develop a set of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) radio-routers, then known as "packet radios". It was a follow-on to DARPA's earlier PRNET project. The program beg ...
systems. Later BBN efforts included the networking portions of the
Near-term digital radio The Near-term digital radio (NTDR) program provided a prototype mobile ad hoc network (MANET) radio system to the United States Army, starting in the 1990s. The MANET protocols were provided by Bolt, Beranek and Newman; the radio hardware was su ...
(NTDR) and
High-capacity data radio High-capacity data radio (HCDR) is a development of the Near-Term Digital Radio (NTDR) for the UK government as a part of the Bowman communication system. It is a secure wideband 225–450 MHz UHF radio system that provides a self-managing I ...
(HCDR), the Wideband Networking Software in the
Joint Tactical Radio System The Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) aimed to replace existing radios in the American military with a single set of software-defined radios that could have new frequencies and modes (“waveforms”) added via upload, instead of requiring mult ...
and the
Wireless Network after Next {{more footnotes, date=June 2019 The Wireless Network after Next (WNaN) was a DARPA project to create and demonstrate an advanced tactical mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) that rapidly adapts to soldiers maneuvering in complicated environments, aut ...
(WNaN). It also created the networking portions of the U.S. Army's Mobile Subscriber Equipment (MSE) and Canada's
Iris Digital Communications System The Iris Digital Communications System, also known as the Tactical Command, Control, and Communications System (TCCCS), is a tactical communication system used by the Canadian Army. It was a pioneering system that integrated voice and data communi ...
.


Notable BBNers

A number of well-known computer luminaries have worked at BBN, including Daniel Bobrow, Ron Brachman,
John Seely Brown John Seely Brown (born 1940), also known as "JSB", is an American researcher who specializes in organizational studies with a particular bend towards the organizational implications of computer-supported activities. Brown served as Director of X ...
, Edmund Clarke, Allan Collins, William Crowther, John Curran,
Chip Elliott Chip Elliott is an American engineer, best known for his work in creating advanced computer networks. Elliott was Northfield Mount Hermon School's first graduate as 1972 class orator, where he won the Bausch & Lomb science prize and was named a ...
,
Wally Feurzeig Wallace "Wally" Feurzeig (June 10, 1927 – January 4, 2013) was an American computer scientist who was co-inventor, with Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, of the programming language Logo, and a well-known researcher in artificial intellig ...
,
Ed Fredkin Ed, ed or ED may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Ed'' (film), a 1996 film starring Matt LeBlanc * Ed (''Fullmetal Alchemist'') or Edward Elric, a character in ''Fullmetal Alchemist'' media * ''Ed'' (TV series), a TV series that ran fro ...
,
Bob Kahn Robert Elliot Kahn (born December 23, 1938) is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the hear ...
, Steve Kent,
J. C. R. Licklider Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
, John Makhoul, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Dan Murphy, Severo Ornstein, Seymour Papert,
Craig Partridge Dr. Craig Partridge is an American computer scientist, best known for his contributions to the technical development of the Internet. Partridge graduated in 1979 from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C. He received his A.B. in history i ...
,
Radia Perlman Radia Joy Perlman (; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her inventi ...
, Oliver Selfridge,
Cynthia Solomon Cynthia Solomon is an American computer scientist known for her work in artificial intelligence (AI) and popularizing computer science for students. She is a pioneer in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and educational c ...
, Bob Thomas, Ray Tomlinson,
Bill Woods William Woods (born 1962 in Moruya, New South Wales) is an Australian television journalist, radio and television broadcaster, and author. He is best known as the presenter, alongside Sandra Sully, of Network Ten's '' Ten News at Five'' in Syd ...
, and Peiter "Mudge" Zatko. Former BBNer
Dedre Gentner Dedre Dariel Gentner (born 1944) is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. She is a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning. Wor ...
is Alice Gabrielle Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. Former board members include
Jim Breyer James W. Breyer (born July 26, 1961) is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. B ...
, Anita K. Jones and Gilman Louie.


Spin-offs and mergers

* In 1971, BBN's
TELCOMP TELCOMP was a programming language developed at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in about 1964 and in use until at least 1974. BBN offered TELCOMP as a paid service, with first revenue in October 1965. The service was sold to On-Line Systems, Inc ...
subsidiary was sold. * In the 1970s, BBN created
Telenet Telenet was an American commercial packet-switched network which went into service in 1975. It was the first FCC-licensed public data network in the United States. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lines ...
, Inc., to run the first public packet-switched network. * In 1983, BBN Instruments was sold to Vibro-Meter Corp. * In 1989, BBN's acoustical consulting business was spun off into a new corporation, Acentech Incorporated, located across the street from BBN headquarters in Cambridge. * In 1994, LightStream Corp., a joint venture with
Ungermann-Bass Ungermann-Bass, also known as UB and UB Networks, was a computer networking company in the 1980s to 1990s. Located in Santa Clara, California, UB was the first large networking company independent of any computer manufacturer. Along with competito ...
, Inc. created in 1992 to manufacture asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches, was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. US$120 million. * BBN formed an early Internet service provider in 1994 as its BBN Planet division. Previously traded as "BBN" on the stock market, the company was purchased by GTE in 1997 as a wholly owned subsidiary. BBN Planet was joined with GTE's national fiber network to become GTE Internetworking, "powered by BBN". When GTE and Bell Atlantic merged to become Verizon in 2000, the Internet service provider division of BBN was included in assets spun off as Genuity to satisfy Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements, leaving behind the remainder of BBN Technologies. Genuity was later acquired out of bankruptcy by Level 3 Communications in 2003. In March 2004, Verizon sold the remainder of the company, by then known as BBNT Solutions LLC, to a group of private investors from
Accel Partners Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ...
,
General Catalyst Partners A general officer is an officer of high rank in the armies, and in some nations' air forces, space forces, and marines or naval infantry. In some usages the term "general officer" refers to a rank above colonel."general, adj. and n.". OED O ...
,
In-Q-Tel In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with ...
and BBN's own management, making BBN an independent company for the next five years. * In September 2009, Raytheon entered into an agreement to acquire BBN as a wholly owned subsidiary. The acquisition was completed on 29 October 2009 and the company was valued at approximately US$350 million. BBN owned the domain bbn.com, the second oldest currently registered domain name on the Internet, which ran continuously from April 1985 to mid-December 2019. * Digital Force Technologies (DFT) of San Diego, California was a wholly owned BBN subsidiary, purchased in June 2008, and spun out in 2018. * Former BBN employees have formed about a hundred startup companies with varying levels of official involvement, including Parlance Corporation and EveryZing.


Locations and subsidiaries

As of 2013, Raytheon BBN maintains offices in: *
Cambridge Highlands Cambridge Highlands also known as "Area 12", is a neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts bounded by the railroad tracks on the north and east, the Belmont town line on the west, and Fresh Pond on the south. In 2005 it had a population of 673 re ...
,
Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...
*
Columbia, Maryland Columbia is a census-designated place in Howard County, Maryland, Howard County, Maryland. It is one of the principal communities of the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area. It is a planned community consisting of 10 self-contained villages ...
*
St. Louis Park, Minnesota St. Louis Park is a city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 50,010 at the 2020 census. It is a first-ring suburb immediately west of Minneapolis. Other adjacent cities include Edina, Golden Valley, Minnetonka, Pl ...
* O'Fallon, Illinois * Newport East, Middletown, Rhode Island near Naval Station NewportBBN Technologies
RIEDC Retrieved on 2013-07-26
*
Rosslyn, Arlington, Virginia Rosslyn ( ) is a heavily urbanized unincorporated area in Northern Virginia located in the northeastern corner of Arlington County, Virginia, north of Arlington National Cemetery and directly across the Potomac River from Georgetown and Foggy Bo ...
near
Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...


See also

* Oldest registered domain names *
DARWARS {{nofootnotes, date=June 2016 DARWARS was a research program at DARPA intended to accelerate the development and deployment of military training systems. These were envisioned as low-cost, mobile, web-centric, simulation-based, “lightweight” sy ...
, a military simulation game developed with DARPA since 2003 * George G. Robertson * Richard E. Hayden *
Interlisp Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, ...


Notes


References


Bibliography

* *


External links

* * with various figures about BBN and the ARPANET,
Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation ...
, University of Minnesota. Figures include the following
Vinton G. CerfFrank HeartRobert E. KahnLeonard KleinrockAlexander A. McKenzieSevero OrnsteinDavid C. WaldenCharles A. Zraket
and others. {{Authority control Networking companies of the United States Companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts Communications in Massachusetts Defense companies of the United States Technology companies established in 1948 Time-sharing companies Raytheon Company 2009 mergers and acquisitions