History
Founded in 1948, by Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, professors at MIT, with Bolt's former student Robert Newman, Bolt, Beranek and Newman started life as an acoustical consulting company. Their first contract was consultation for the design of the acoustics of the United Nations Assembly Hall in New York. Subsequent commissions included MIT's Kresge Auditorium (1954), Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Music Shed (1959), Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall (1962), the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1969) and Baltimore's Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (1978). They have examined the Richard Nixon tape with the 18 minutes erased during the Watergate scandal and the Dictabelt evidence which was purportedly a recording of the JFK assassination.
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, and in designing noise barriers near highways. Some of this technology was used in landmark legal cases where BBN scientists were expert witnesses. BBN bought a number of computers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably the first production PDP-1 from Digital Equipment Corporation. BBN was involved in building some of the earliest Internet networks, including ARPANET, MILNET, CSNET, and NEARNET.
In 1989, BBN's acoustical consulting business was spun off into a new corporation, Acentech Incorporated, also based in Cambridge.
In 1998 BBN's ISP division BBN Planet was acquired by GTE. 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 ISP portion of BBN was included in assets spun off as Genuity. In March 2004, Verizon sold BBN to a group of private investors. In September 2009, Raytheon entered into an agreement to acquire BBN. The acquisition was completed on October 29, 2009 and the company was valued at approximately $350 million.
A number of well-known computer luminaries have worked at BBN, including John Seely Brown, Jerry Burchfiel, Richard Burton, Allan Collins, William Crowther, John Curran, Wally Feurzeig, Ed Fredkin, Bob Kahn, J. C. R. Licklider, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Dan Murphy, Severo Ornstein, Seymour Papert, Oliver Selfridge, Bob Thomas, Ray Tomlinson, and Peiter "Mudge" Zatko.
Former board members include Jim Breyer, Anita K. Jones and Gilman Louie.
Read more about this topic: BBN Technologies
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