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◈ALB Atlas

Bolt, Beranek and Newman Superseded

Bolt, Beranek and Newman
KindCompany
Founded1948
Defunct2009
StatusSuperseded
FoundersBolt, Beranek & Newman
FieldResearch
Also known asBBN
Sourcewww.bbn.com ↗

Acoustics consultants who built the ARPANET's IMPs, wrote TENEX, and sent the first email with an @ sign. Absorbed into Raytheon in 2009.

Created TENEX

MIT acoustics professors Bolt and Beranek founded BBN in 1948; it became ARPA's computing contractor of choice. Its engineers built the IMPs — the ARPANET's packet switches — in 1969; Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email (@ sign) there in 1971; TENEX gave the PDP-10 a virtual-memory OS.

Later acquisitions folded BBN into GTE, then Verizon; Raytheon bought it in 2009 for ~$350 million. The name survives as RTX BBN Technologies.

Sources

  1. bbn.com/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBN_Technologies