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from the thanks-to-you,-we-can-meet-here dept.
Leo L. Beranek, an engineer whose company designed the acoustics for the United Nations and concert halls at Lincoln Center and Tanglewood, then built the direct precursor to the internet under contract to the Defense Department, died on Oct. 10 at his home in Westwood, Mass. He was 102.
His death was confirmed by his son James.
Dr. Beranek taught acoustic engineering at Harvard and M.I.T. for more than three decades after World War II, conducting research there that laid the groundwork for acoustic advances with wide social impact, including noise standards for public buildings and airports. But one of his most notable achievements was well outside the field of acoustics.
In 1969, the company he helped found, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, won a contract from the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency to build the first computer-based network, which came to be called Arpanet.
When were you first exposed to the Arpanet/Internet? Did you ever use "Bang Paths" for sending e-mail?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @02:03AM
First used internet email in 1991. Never used a bang path.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snotnose on Wednesday October 19 2016, @03:40AM
First used email in 82/83. Was a sysadmin in 90 when the first version of DNS came out. It was a lifesaver, and a hell of a lot of reading to figure out how to configure it.
BTW, I'm thinking of shaving off my neckbeard. Wanna buy it? That and some gorilla glue might make you smarter, or at least think you are.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @03:54AM
No thanks, I don't want to get glue in my own neckbeard. You might try selling your neckbeardwig to some young hipster who wants to wear it ironically and pretend to be an oldtimey antisocial idiot from the time before social media made everyone a supergenius.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by daver!west!fmc on Wednesday October 19 2016, @05:49AM
I had seen ARPANET e-mail in the late 1970s on one or another of MIT's PDP-10s. It inspired me to write a simple e-mail system on the HP 3000 at my school, but it had nothing like networking, just modems in answer mode for dialup users with terminals.
First used Internet e-mail in, hmm, 1986? Something like that. Didn't use it much until 1988. There was a VAX running 4.3BSD there, with netnews feeds and running pathalias. I used it to figure out how to route e-mail to some of our distributors in Europe who had uucp connections for e-mail. That was where my understanding of !-paths came in handy.
I think my user name is no longer a valid way to send me e-mail, although I still read e-mail on a system that thinks it is "west", and it is still polling a system called "daver" every hour. Over TCP these days, no more Trailblazers.
(Score: 1) by mce on Wednesday October 19 2016, @11:10PM
First e-mail was in October 1988 - starting my final year as a CS student. Students did not get access until their final year because the department's infrastructure would not have been able to handle the load otherwise. Not a proper Internet mail yet.
First Internet mail a few days later at the EE research institute at which I did my masters thesis work. They had more money...