SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.