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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:55AM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:19PM

    by Dr Spin (5239) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:19PM (#416266)

    Some time around 1997, I and some colleagues used the company's Intel 8080 development system to implement a war dialler, and dialled all the numbers on the LANgham (580) exchange in London (the only digital exchange in the UK at the time).
    It logged all numbers that answered with a modem tone. Then we dialled them up with an ASR33 and acoustic coupler and looked at the results. Most were banks, but some (3 I think) were "pads" - where you could connect to ARPAnet.

    When we dialled the PADs, they asked you to login, so we entered "asdfg" then it asked for a password, so we typed "password" (ever the ingenious ones) and it replied "Password checking is not yet implemented. Go ahead" so we hit return and saw what happened. After
    playing about for several night shifts*, we learned enough to access several BBN systems in the USA, and a few Universities.

    As none of us knew how to use DEC10, but a few of us knew how to use PDP11s, we made a list of the PDP11 sites, and used them to play adventure, or to do "word processing" with TECO, I think. We had root access somehow, and I created user accounts for myself
    on a machine belonging to a University in Texas, MIT, and at least one other. You had to declare the purpose for which you were using the computer when creating an account, and I normally wrote something like "World domination by 1863" - assuming that at least
    one sysadmin would eventually ask how I came to do time travel.

    AFAICT, no one ever noticed.

    To this day, I often dated documents things like 33 February 1776, and outside of banks and Postgresql, no one seems to notice.

    *Compiling on the paper tape based Intel MDS system generally took a good few hours, and it was single user - and an asset that expensive had to be operated 24 hours to justify the expense.

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:23PM

    by Dr Spin (5239) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:23PM (#416270)

    Sorry, another wrong date from me - that was 1977, or course.

    Yes I still do have a copy of my Original K&R C manual printed on an asr33 from those days.

    And cross compiling 8080 assembler on a PDP11 would have been faster and cheaper, and a whole lot less painful, but management did not allow that sort of thing.

    --
    Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!