Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died | Hacker News Reader

Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died

nytimes.com

290 pointssew29 comments

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.

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

nice link to learn about the ideas of the internet pioneers

Thank you very much for sharing this!

Thank you for sharing this story. Always fascinating to learn more about computer pioneers.

For those who've not seen the film "Computer Networks - The Herald of Resource Sharing" from 1972, I think you'll find it fascinating how many things they got right 40+ years ago and how many ideas became our reality. JCR Licklider is featured prominently in the film.

https://archive.org/details/ComputerNetworks_TheHeraldsOfRes...

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.

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.

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

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...

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.'

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/

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

Yes, happy memories (1972?) of sitting at a terminal next to Harvard's CRCT IMP (56Kb connections to 2 other nodes, woohoo!) late at night and picking up the phone on the side when it rang, with BBN network ops folks calling and asking me to reboot it manually...

(The IMP also functioned as a local router between the PDP-10 and the PDP-1.)

I also remember Ray Tomlinson well from the first email list on the ARPAnet, meta-appropriately about email lists, protocols, and clients.

Those were simpler times when receiving an email was done by anonymous FTP appending to your mail.txt file.

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.

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

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!!!

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.

A 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

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.

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.

ifdown eth0 ; sleep 60 ; ifup eth0

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.)

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.

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?

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_...

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.

You're suggesting a dichotomoy that isn't there. They assuredly focused on his life, not the length of it directly, in the article. It's simply customary as a suggestion of who and how someone died when it's particular ages.

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